


The Contest

by YourGayDads



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Ableism, Absolutely no plot whatsoever, All kinds of sex, BDSM Scene, Implied/Referenced Suicide, London, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Prison Plantation, Tags Are Hard, bethlem, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2019-08-09 10:33:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 64,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourGayDads/pseuds/YourGayDads
Summary: A Thomas Hamilton-centric fic.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thomas as a teenager. Kind of a mess. You know, like a teenager.

Thomas paid little mind to his father’s daily slights about his demeanor not befitting the son of a prominent family, or to his less frequent tirades about his more blatant transgressions. Like a clock that shouted on the hour instead of pealed, they gave order to his admittedly shiftless summers when he idled away his time instead of ingratiating himself to his father’s peers. Between reading and napping, he bathed in the river where he reminisced about Keswick’s impersonation of sleeping Hermaphroditus, or brushed Hadrian in the stables where he could watch Oswyn, the groundskeeper’s son, glisten with sweat as he cut grass.

Children were not children but particularly small and stupid adults. At least that was what Thomas’s father would have liked him to believe. It should have been enough that he was born, but Thomas seemed intent on exploding his father’s life ever since he first drew breath outside of the womb. With his squalling and hunger and incessant need for human contact, he burst out of his swaddling every time to his nurse’s exhausted bewilderment. Due to his habits of crawling on the floor and mewling like an animal, Thomas spent most of his first year in his rooms until he could finally reach the doorknob and scamper away from his dozing attendant. His father blamed his overly doting mother for this excess of emotions and bemoaned that young Thomas wasn’t the paragon of practicality and reason he was when he was his age. He announced to anyone who had to listen his noble intent of ridding Thomas of his willful disobedience until all that was left was what he deemed right.

Although Thomas still wore his hair as he did when he was little boy, he had never been stupid, which only infuriated his father more when he refused to join the hunting party. Lord Wintersloe, whose family held land nearby, agreed to participate to the satisfaction of the Earl, who sought the favor of the man’s father, the fourth Marquess of Edlaston. He was the kind of son Thomas’s father wished he would emulate, the kind who dutifully attended a gathering of boring old men in his indisposed father’s stead. The name Thomas remembered for its poetic quality but not the bearer of it, uninterested as he was in those who were willing to concern themselves with his father’s agendas.

Blackwell announced Wintersloe’s arrival, but Thomas could scarcely lift his eyes from his book.

“Who is that?” Keswick asked, prodding him with his folded fan.

Thomas’s eyes followed the length of the fan to the other side of the great room. They landed on the man called Wintersloe, who, to his surprise, cut quite a fine figure, at least from what Thomas could see as he was faced away from him. His back was broad, his legs and neck long, his carriage confident yet relaxed, especially compared to a few of the gout-ridden men standing nearby. Even the stretch of his coat between his shoulder blades was a welcome distraction from the rampant carnage of _The Histories_. Thomas bet he smelled like the leather of his boots and maybe firewood. He wondered how his thumb might feel in his mouth.

Having gotten no response, his friend prodded him again. 

“Thomelyn, you’re nibbling your book.”

“What?”

“That fellow yonder. The one you are rapaciously undressing with your eyes.”

“The Marquess of Edlaston’s son. I believe.”

“You believe?”

Thomas shrugged. “I never paid him any regard before.”

“And now?”

“And now…I see there are certain aspects of him one can appreciate.”

“Hm. Well. Yes. Indeed. I think I see what aspects to which you may be referring.” Keswick wagged his fan. “Go forth, dear cabbage. As a man of science, I require empirical evidence that his anterior is as alluring as his posterior.”

Thomas groaned. He knew Keswick would bat any protest away until he capitulated. Once he gathered enough courage, he pushed Keswick’s feet off his lap and willed himself off the chaise longue. For the purpose of research, he approached Wintersloe, who was unfortunately by then engaged with his father.

“I see my indolent son has decided to join civilization.”

“Ah, young Hamilton,” Wintersloe greeted Thomas. 

In his mind, the man had been much older, but he was in actuality no more than a few years Thomas’s senior, his face still as smooth and unlined as his was. His eyes were bright, tumbled stones, a wintry blue flecked with gold. His smile leaned to the right, and Thomas noted that the eyetooth it revealed was chipped.

“My, how long ago was it that you only rose to my ears?” he asked, his tone far too avuncular for his age.

“Sprouted like the most pernicious weed,” the Earl groused. “The amount of money that had to be spent on new clothes was truly obscene.”

“I understand now his reluctance to join us. I remember when I underwent such a transformation, the pain that afflicted me.”

Like his mother, Thomas was so accustomed to his father’s dismissal of any complaint that it was only now, listening to Wintersloe, he realized he never even spoke of the pain. His hampered gait had put his father in an unrelenting snit that took the air out of every room, all 117 of them. Thomas had sensed the eyes of all the servants urging him to walk faster whenever he passed so that his father’s reign of terror upon them would abate as well.

Thomas turned to Wintersloe to speak, eager to enthrall him with his sophisticated wit and charm, but when he opened his mouth, what came forth wasn’t a clever bon mot about foul hunting. What came forth instead was a hiccup. A loud one. A loud, clucking squeak of a hiccup. His father widened his eyes in horror at him. To Thomas’s mortification, the hiccup was joined by others so he clapped a hand over his mouth. While his chest fitfully hopped, he glanced at the other side of the room and saw Keswick hiding behind Herodotus. 

“Our, er, physician had suggested the only remedy was to avoid unnecessary exertion until the muscles had suitably stretched,” Wintersloe gamely continued.

“If my son avoided any more exertion, he’d be dead. Lord Wintersloe, let us part for the pheasant await. We shall see if you are as good a marksman as your father.”

Thomas’s father shot him an exasperated look before trudging away, shaking his head. Wintersloe emitted a stiff laugh of obligation. As he headed towards the entrance hall, he smiled and nodded at Thomas in farewell.

Years had passed since this brief encounter during which Thomas couldn’t even speak, but he never forgot it. That night he wrapped himself around a bottle of brandy and wept in the dark folds of the ornamental gardens, wishing that meager display of sympathy didn’t cause him so much sorrow. When he could finally breathe again, he staggered back towards the manor. As he oscillated wildly across the lawn, he grabbed at the air and at every shrub along the way, searching for support and finding none. When a footman opened the door, he fell into the hall, scattering leaves and twigs about. The empty bottle rolled away from him. Its journey ended at his father’s feet.

“Don’t touch him!”

Pembrook rose from his kneel and returned to his post against the wall. Thomas raised his head. He thought to express his anguish, believing his father was, at his core, a reasonable man, but he could only burble nonsense, sentence fragments and malformed words drawn out on a wet string. 

He hoisted himself up onto his hands and knees and crawled towards the stairs. When the left balustrade entered his smudged vision, he told himself if he ascended the stairs, he would somehow get out of harm’s way. So he shifted forward another impossibly vast distance of a few feet, but the ground swung away from him, and he was pitched onto his side. He conceded then that perhaps the floor was a fine place for lying down, but his father disagreed.

“Get. Up.”

Thomas propped himself up on an unsteady arm. He hooked a hand around a baluster and hauled himself up the first few steps before collapsing on them.

“Get up!”

He was more acutely aware of all the air leaving his body in a single expulsion than the kick to the gut that came before it. 

“For God’s sake!”

_Get up._

The following morning, while Thomas was still half asleep and half out of his mind, his father’s valet cut off his hair. He kept it that length ever since.

Thomas completed his second year at Oxford quite pleased with himself. Although he wasn’t looking forward to the long, uncomfortable journey back to Ashbourne, he did look forward to lazing away the summer there again. As he walked to the carriage, Keswick trailed behind him, sniffling and dabbing his eyes with Thomas’s handkerchief. 

His arrival preceded his parents’ by several weeks. Only a handful of servants were present to maintain the grounds and prepare the meals he would eat alone. Otherwise he had the manor to himself, which was what he had hoped for. He was dismayed though to learn from Matilda that Oswyn was no longer in their employ. A soldier now, she said. Comfortable in the knowledge that Thomas would take no offense or repeat her words, she joked that he would rather take his chances with the French than with the Earl. Thomas wished he had chosen to continue his apprenticeship with the gardener but more importantly their trysts in the hothouse. When he reached the stables and set eyes on Hadrian, his heart readily discarded poor Oswyn. The groom had kept his horse more than well throughout the year, knowing she was Thomas’s favorite. 

As he and Hadrian approached the river, his skin gradually sloughed off the world with its plagues and its fires, its storms and its wars. Here, worries were not welcome. He hitched the horse downstream in the shade and immediately shed his clothing. He found the niche beneath the low branch of an ancient sessile oak tree that he dug out of the riverbank when he was a child. For hours until he could no longer move his little arms, he shifted the stones to create an underwater throne for himself. It required occasional adjusting due to nature and his own body, but year after year it remained mostly intact. He eased himself into the frigid waters, yelping with each inch he submerged, until he was fully, blissfully seated. 

While he watched his toes bob in the water, he loudly butchered an aria from _L’Orfeo_ , only stopping to drink from a bottle of wine. When the sun was highest in the sky, its warmth beckoned him to lie out on the grass. Happily humming to himself, he created a pillow of his clothes and laid his head down on it. Already lulled by alcohol, he promptly fell asleep to the sound of the river’s rush and the whine of the cicadas.

“Is that young Hamilton?”

Thomas didn’t stir since no one could possibly be there to call to him.

“That is you.”

Thomas reluctantly lifted his head and squinted at the figure petting Hadrian’s muzzle. Annoyed by the intrusion, he refused to get up or get dressed and only sat up naked, shading his eyes.

“Who’s there?”

“Wintersloe. My father was the fourth Marquess of Edlaston.”

Thomas recognized him now and recalled his father commenting on his continental exploits, which explained his long absence. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a shotbag and a sword. A long gun rested against his shoulder. Standing next to Hadrian, he resembled a figure in a winsome pastoral painting. His brown and white spaniel trotted up to Thomas and sniffed excitedly at the bundle of clothes in his lap.

“Are you without an attendant?”

“I am alone. If you don’t count the dog. I much prefer it this way.”

“We are alike in that regard. Has Diana shown you her favor today?” Thomas asked as he finally started to dress.

“As you can see, not at all,” he answered cheerfully with his arms open.

“I hope your dog doesn’t think me your quarry.”

“You would certainly be the biggest pheasant he’s ever flushed out. Bacchus, come here.”

The dog leapt back and forth, frantically debating whose attention he needed more in that moment. He ran in circles around Thomas as he walked towards Wintersloe. 

“Does she have a name?” he asked, his attention still fixed on the horse.

“Hadrian.”

“Hadrian? An interesting choice of name for a mare.” 

“She was one of five that were gifted to the family. It seemed obvious to name them after the five good emperors. Although my father considers the naming of animals an act of sentimental fools.”

“I suppose we and a certain King William are sentimental fools then.”

 _We._ Heat crept up Thomas’s neck. 

Since they last saw each other, Thomas fancied that he had come into his own. Learned in all aspects of life including sex, he pitied the younger for their naïveté, but his newfound confidence was apparently of poor construction. He could happily argue on the side of Milton’s Satan and navigate ancient Greek history, but here he was, silently pleading with his horse for guidance.

“It is my fortune that I’ve come across you. After my father passed, the Earl allowed me to freely hunt on his land, but I’m afraid I’ve gotten…lost.”

“Can you find your way from the house?”

Wintersloe nodded. “Yes, that should be no problem.”

Thomas picked up his discarded boots and tugged on Hadrian’s reins. He walked her between them so that he needn’t struggle so hard to suppress his nervous smiling. His face often gave away too much, something he knew needed intensive schooling if he was to assume his father’s line of work. Fortunately Wintersloe didn’t seem to take notice of the fact that Thomas was hiding next to his horse.

“He sleeps in the hunting lodge with all of his trophies. But his preferred place is by the fire, at my feet,” Wintersloe replied, answering a question Thomas had already forgotten.

“If I were your dog…”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ _Nothing._ ”

“Is the Earl here? I ought to give him my regards if he is.”

“He and my mother don’t arrive for a month. I’m here by myself. Quite happily.”

“You would turn down an invitation to Edlaston for dinner then?”

“Surely my father has spoken to you of my incompetence at being a dutiful scion of the family.”

“Oh, I pay none of that any mind. A parent’s assessment of his own child so rarely aligns with reality. But if you ever are desirous of company, I am here for a few weeks before I return to London.”

Thomas sounded his amenability in lieu of exclaiming, _Desirous, yes!_

When they reached the manor, Wintersloe declined the use of the family’s carriage and departed without fuss, Bacchus charging ahead of him. Once he was out of sight, Thomas fell back into his body. He adjusted the collar of his shirt and smoothed down his hair, now intensely aware of the disheveled and partially dressed state he was in. 

For days, Thomas rolled Wintersloe’s offer around in his head like a restless dung beetle. If Keswick were with him, Thomas would have already appeared in Edlaston on horseback, declaring his intentions. Considering how often his influence had landed him in the headmaster’s and now dean’s office, Thomas couldn’t help erring on the side of prudence. When he returned to bathe in the river, he simply hoped Wintersloe would come across his naked form again. He envisioned himself rising out of the water and standing before him in all his glory, and Wintersloe, so overwhelmed with lust, dropping his gun and flinging his hat away with abandon to sweep the younger man into his arms and make love to him on the grass. As his body closed in around him, all heat and heaving muscle, Thomas began to absentmindedly tug on himself. Those hands. That mouth. The part of him Thomas’s imagination was most generous with.

Thomas dropped his head back, panting, his hand increasing its pace. Through half-open eyes, he caught Hadrian staring at him with a mouth full of grass. 

“Look away, horse!”

Wintersloe did not appear again.

The cavernous emptiness of the manor had come to make his skin and mind itch. Desperate to rid himself of this anxiety, Thomas finally asked Blackwell to deliver a message to the Wintersloe residence, requesting the Marquess’ presence for supper. He sat on the stairs and studied the same two pages of peaches in Oswyn’s old seed catalogue until Blackwell returned, note in hand. 

Thomas smiled and ran up the stairs.

He dressed himself as well as he could without assistance and waited at his bedroom window, trying hard to ignore the tragic work he made of his cravat. When he saw a carriage arrive on the road, he launched himself off the sill and sped out into the corridor and down the staircase. His foot caught the edge of the entrance hall carpet, and he careered, flailing, into a console table. Blackwell fired his disapproval at him from the corner of his eye just as Thomas managed to catch a tipped vase. 

Wintersloe entered the poorly lit room and handed Blackwell his hat. Thomas set the vase down and skipped his first step as he rushed up to him with his hand extended.

“I apologize for the state of the house.”

“Apologies are not necessary. Ours is admittedly in a similar state right now. After my father’s death, we haven’t entertained guests, and my mother has found that mourning suits her.”

“Unfortunately we will have to eat in my rooms.”

“As long I don’t have to dress a deer or scrub any pots, I will be satisfied with any arrangement.”

Matilda left a small spread for them in Thomas’s study off his bedroom. When he sat down, he immediately regretted his seat of choice. From that side of the table, his bed loomed large behind Wintersloe, mocking him. He swiftly drained his glass of port and then with equal swiftness refilled it to the brim. Wintersloe took his time with his wine and affably extolled their modest meal. After innumerable offerings of pickled herring while in the Dutch Republic, he sorely missed the food of home.

“All those carrots too. Turned my piss orange for three years.”

Thomas laughed, put slightly at ease by his familiar tone. He commended himself for nodding at the appropriate times while also imagining them entwined beneath his sheets. He pushed his own helpings around on the plate with his fingers, stopping occasionally to pensively chew the tip of an asparagus spear. He was far keener on the port than the food and poured out glass after glass for himself.

He rose to get another decanter from the side cabinet. As he rounded Wintersloe’s chair, he placed a hand on his shoulder. It was a harmless enough gesture, free of connotation, but then he dared himself to sink his fingertips into the velvet and let them linger. Thomas prayed for a favorable response as he held his breath, waiting for judgment. Without turning, Wintersloe put his hand over his and applied the slightest pressure that brought Thomas nearly to burst.

“Are you all right, Thomas?”

That same kind voice, and he was sixteen-years-old again. He watched, almost paralyzed with disbelief, as Wintersloe peeled the hand from his shoulder and slowly brought the palm to his mouth. 

A knot burgeoned in Thomas’s throat, obstructing the flow of air. There was a loud, insistent buzzing in his ears. His vision doubled, tripled, until he saw nothing at all.

“Thomas!”

Perhaps the entire evening had been a dream. After all, he was lying down on his bed with his eyes closed. When he opened them, or when he thought he did, he noticed there was no disruption in the continuity, disorienting him further. The hand on his certainly felt real as it did when it touched him earlier. The face that hovered over his he was not as certain of so he reached out and poked it none too gingerly.

“Thomas, I think you might have had too much wi — ah.” Wintersloe moved Thomas’s finger out of his eye.

“Too much wi — ah,” Thomas repeated, chuckling. 

He looked down at himself and saw that his waistcoat lay open, and he was without shoes, but more critically that his cock had conspicuously swelled against the front of his breeches. At the sight of this, he became overcome with delirious giggling. 

“Not enough wine, Lord Wintersloe.”

Thomas took the hand that held his and guided it down his body. Wintersloe’s lips parted as his eyes followed the path their hands took.

“You can kiss me now,” Thomas soberly remarked.

For the next few weeks Wintersloe joined him in the manor, where they rutted against the ghostly furnishings, their grunts and groans reverberating in the galleries and vaulted spaces. They flung open all of the curtains and fucked in the daylight until they passed out in the clouds of dancing dust. They chased each other from room to room, casting off their clothes with little concern for recovering them later. Still tacky with their combined effluences, they drank and fed, their fingers taking the long way in and out of each other’s mouths. Lovemaking like tussling in nests of tangled bedding slowed into lazy inspections of their bruises.

Wintersloe kissed a grid-like pattern of discoloration on Thomas’s ribs.

“Hmmm, I think I see a pineapple finial.”

“And this?”

“The handle on the wardrobe in the…um…”

“And this one?”

“Ow! The old trestle table in the library, you brute.”

“Oh, a brute, am I?”

With his wrists pinned to the floor, his back rubbed raw on the carpet, his toes cramping as they curled, Thomas caught sight of himself in a tarnished overmantle mirror. He laughed at how ridiculous they looked, but their appearance was no more ridiculous than the thought that this might be paradise. Stowed away in this empty, fatherless house, unburdened by obligation or even clothing, doing as he pleased, loving the man who already made him come twice that morning. If only he could live like this forever. 

Wintersloe collapsed on top of him, panting his name into his neck. 

But Thomas knew he couldn’t. 

“Disownment?”

“That would only draw unwanted attention.”

“Hanging?”

“If I could die with a full heart as well as a hard cock.”

“Castration?”

“Well, now there is absolutely no discussion to be had about that.”

“Exile?”

“I like to think in a world as large as this, there is more than one place for me.”

Thomas briskly padded towards the upper grand room. Along the way he grabbed a dustsheet off of a commode and pulled it around his head like a hooded cape. Instead of fussing with the buckle of his garter, he tore away his right stocking, the only article of clothing left on him, and flung it to the side, hoping to throw Wintersloe off his trail. When he reached the other side of the room, he huddled behind an old oak chair and draped the sheet over it and himself. He listened intently to Wintersloe’s footsteps as he entered the vast space to search for his whereabouts. He put a hand over his mouth to control his snickering as Wintersloe neared the chair.

“Thomas, where the hell are you…“

After an excruciating minute, his voice drifted away into the distance. Thomas could no longer hear him and assumed he had looped back to the far end of the room. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, ready to spring up in triumph, when his covering was yanked away from him like the lid of a tureen.

“Jesus!!!”

Thomas fell backwards trying to deflect his balled-up stocking as it came flying at his head. Wintersloe lunged at him and forcibly pulled him up in his arms. Underestimating Thomas’s weight, he tipped them both into the chair. The strident crack of splintering wood gave them both pause before they burst out laughing. Thomas quickly rearranged himself on his lap and pressed his smile hard against his lover’s mouth. Wintersloe’s hands smoothed down his sides and over his hips to clutch his backside. He kneaded it with a rough possessiveness that Thomas yielded to easily. He bit down on his lip when a finger found his entrance. Wintersloe pushed against the puckered skin, just breaching the tight aperture.

“So is that to be your prize?”

He tilted his head in the most serious, brow-knitting contemplation. When Thomas tried to work himself against his finger, Wintersloe promptly withdrew it. Thomas thumped Wintersloe’s chest with the side of his fist in feigned outrage.

“Think faster.”

“All right.” He smiled broadly. “On your feet, Hamilton.”

Wintersloe led him to one of the large windows and opened the lower left casement. He backed Thomas up to it so his ass was to the wind. The mixture of childish delight at and fear of possibly being seen stoked Thomas’s arousal. Wintersloe studied his placement then shifted him a little to the right before kneeling down at his feet. As he looked wondrously up at Thomas, he removed the garter and tossed it over his shoulder so that he could run his hands up and down those long and lean legs without impediment. They eventually settled on his knees, his fingers lightly grazing the backs of them.

“Well? Get on with it.”

“Patience is a virtue, Thomas.”

“If we’re suddenly concerned with virtue, this is not going to be very fun.”

Wintersloe grinned wickedly. He angled his head and leisurely dragged his tongue up the underside of Thomas’s cock. He gave the tip a teasing, serpentine flick. A knee buckled under his hand. 

“Beautiful,” he murmured.

Thomas leaned his head back in anticipation of more, but Wintersloe pushed on one shin and pulled the calf of the other leg forward, turning him around. 

“Oh, is that it then?” 

Thomas bent at the waist, knocking his head against upper window, and grabbed the curtains on either side of him.

Wintersloe pushed his buttocks apart and thumbed his cleft, drawing a line from his tailbone to the back of his scrotum. His laughter, cadenced puffs of air, was hot and maddening on his lower back. He playfully bit one cheek then planted a kiss on the other. He buried another kiss, slow, sucking, and wet in the crease at his thigh. Thomas’s skin prickled all over as if his body understood before his mind did what was about to transpire. He reflexively clenched, jerking away from Wintersloe’s face.

“Are you…?” Thomas asked as he straightened his posture. Not even Keswick had broached this particular act to him.

“Have you already forgotten? I vanquished you.”

“No one gets ‘vanquished’ playing Hide and Fox. I was found,” he said petulantly.

“A fox isn’t only found.”

“I — well, I suppose not.”

Wintersloe stood up. “We had a gentleman’s agreement, did we not? I believe we even shook on it. The finder gets to do whatever he wants to the found.”

“And that is what you want?”

“Yes,” he breathed into his ear. “What I want is to make you feel good, my pretty fox.”

He lined Thomas’s back with his chest and placed his hands on his hips. They moved up his slender torso to his nipples, which he plucked and twisted, rending Thomas’s thoughts and sending bolts of pleasure all the way down to soles of his feet. 

“Can we try this again?”

Thomas nodded, and they resumed their previous positions. Wintersloe spread him open once more and placed the tip of his tongue above his entrance. Thomas breathed deeply as the moist heat of Wintersloe’s mouth moved downwards.

Thomas gasped. This was no wriggling, searching finger. The sensation was different. More animate. The raspy, slippery organ undulated and swelled against him, changing shape from flat and wide to thin and probing. The more Thomas relented to his touch, silk damask twisted tightly around increasingly numb fingers, the deeper Wintersloe’s tongue nudged inward, moving in circles within him. The pleasure of it was isolated at first to that particular spot, but then its heat spread like molasses, filling his balls and pouring into his cock. Along with the obscene sounds of Wintersloe sucking on his wet skin, and the warm spittle that dribbled down his inner thigh, it drove Thomas’s senses wild, and he whimpered helplessly against the window. 

Wintersloe reached up between Thomas’s quivering legs and took him in his saliva-slicked hand. When his fingers ran over the sensitive head of his cock, he belted out a moan.

“Please.”

At his word, Wintersloe’s touch ceased to be deliberate. It didn’t take long thereafter to bring Thomas off. Shudders wracked his body. His knees weakened, almost to collapse. He released the curtains and slapped his hands against the window, grasping futilely at the glass. The heat from his fingers daubed the cool surface with blooms of condensation.

As Wintersloe rose, he slid his hand up Thomas’s dripping fissure to his back where he made comforting circles. 

“We missed.”

“What? Missed what?”

Thomas blinked, barely able to focus on what Wintersloe indicated. He eventually saw that he was pointing to his seed coursing down the leftmost pane of the closed lower casement. He had missed the opening by what must have been an inch.

“Or are you marking your territory?”

Thomas playfully shoved him aside.

Wintersloe uncovered a sofa for him to lie on. Thomas freely spread out on it, wiping the mess coating his thighs on the fine lampas upholstery. Wintersloe sat on the floor beside him and traced his damp hairline with his finger.

“What are you thinking about?” Thomas asked with his eyes closed.

Wintersloe pinched Thomas’s scalp. “That hair you used to have. Like Rubens’s Ganymede.”

Thomas snorted dismissively at the comparison. “Good god, hardly.”

“And what are you thinking about?”

“Figs,” he said after a pause. 

He opened his eyes and looked at the fresco on the ceiling depicting the four seasons. 

“Fish pie. Venison,” he continued as if they manifested themselves in the painted plaster. “Potatoes. In cream.”

He propped himself up on an elbow and kissed Wintersloe, expanding the parameters of his hunger to include him. 

“The rest of the servants will be arriving tomorrow to ready the house for my parents’ arrival. We can at last have a proper meal here together.”

“Thomas.”

“Hm?”

“When I return to London, I am to be betrothed. Before my father died, he made arrangements, and now I must see them through.”

Thomas rolled his eyes and huffed irritably. He dropped down onto the sofa with his back to him. He sounded like how all of his friends had begun to sound. It seemed the subject of every conversation that year was the unavoidable fate of their turning into their fathers. If his own father’s view of him had any benefit, it was a reluctance to even mention the subject of marriage in order to avoid further vexation.

“You suddenly seem so old,” Thomas said, purposefully slighting him.

Wintersloe laughed. “I will be twenty-five soon. And you are most definitely not a boy anymore.”

“If you could, would you marry me?”

It wasn’t a question that was meant to be answered, but when it was met with silence, Thomas pulled the sheet that was draped over the sofa down around his head.

Wintersloe leaned into him. “You understand that this can’t continue. In any way.” 

There was contrition in his tone, and a wistfulness too that already shifted their relationship to the distant past.

Thomas lifted the sheet and turned to meet Wintersloe’s face. He nodded sensibly even though his heart had dropped into his stomach, its ache supplanting his hunger. That duty was regarded as more important than love was so backwards to him, but he also recognized that as being right and reasonable. 

Wintersloe cupped his cheek, but Thomas brushed him away. The kindness he had craved for so long he now wished he could despise, but he could not.

Thomas sat up and extended his hand, which Wintersloe looked at with puzzlement. He eventually slotted his hand in, and Thomas shook it firmly and amicably.

“It was nice to have known you, Lord Wintersloe.”

“Likewise, young Hamilton.”

The next summer, his mother received news of the impending marriage between the Honorable Marquess of Edlaston and Lady Jane Widford, daughter of the Duke of Norwich. 

“Lucky woman,” she remarked into her tea.

Thomas sullenly agreed as he stirred his own tea for the fifth time. His father muttered under his breath at Blackwell, not having paid any attention to his wife. His little brother gibbered with a mouth full of oatmeal before flinging a handful of it in his direction.

He had already witnessed enough times the alchemy of marriage, how it transformed pleasure and partnership into power and property. While he listened to the rite, Thomas wanted to believe he was witnessing something more than the politically expedient union of two families of wealth and influence. He also wanted to believe maybe God would bless someone like him with a partner to provide him comfort and joy, even love; and perhaps even more than that, a partner to whom he could give himself entirely and be entirely accepted. He knew he shouldn’t be so covetous, but could one be too covetous when it came to love?

He joined a queue to give tidings to the couple. Thomas could see over the heads of the other guests, Wintersloe and his bride being escorted out of the room. He sighed, wishing he could take his wig and shoes off, but he so wanted to see his former lover’s face and the look on it when they laid eyes on each other again. The woman next to him stood on her toes, trying to catch a glimpse. Thomas could sense her consternation. She sighed as he did and wrung her hands.

“Oh, Winnie,” she murmured to herself.

_Winnie._

Thomas pivoted towards her. “Winnie?”

During their torrid yet brief time together, Thomas never called him anything but his surname, occasionally letting slip a “my lord!”, but this woman called him “Winnie” as if it was as natural as breathing air. Jealousy bit his breast like a viper.

She turned to face him with too smug a grin. “And what, pray tell, did he have you call him?”

Thomas gawped at her. His face was getting warm. He quickly collected himself and cleared his throat. “I called him Wintersloe of course.”

He surprised himself, all but openly confessing to this complete stranger of his affair, but she had already managed to read him in just one two-syllable exclamation.

“You’re the Earl of Ashbourne’s eldest son.”

“I am. May I ask who you are?”

“Miranda Barlow, daughter of Sir Edmund Barlow.”

“Well, Miss Barlow, I suppose we ought to have words.”

“Many words, my lord.”

  

  

  

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is technically a WIP. I'm hoping by posting this, I get my act together on this faster.
> 
> (And, holy shit, I haven't written fanfic in over 10 years.)


	2. Chapter 2

Thomas sprawled out on Miranda’s bed with her tray of scents on his chest. He had been waiting for her to dress for the ball they were already late for, and boredom was starting to get the better of him. Miranda stood before a full-length mirror while her housemaid Adeliza compressed her into a stay. She warily eyed her husband in its reflection, knowing he and boredom often made for an unpredictable combination.

He sniffed one of the bottles with pronounced curiosity before unleashing a sneeze and tossing them all into a frenzy of clinks and clanks. 

“Thomas!” Miranda cried. “Do take care.”

“All is intact. All is contained. Not a drop spilled,” he declared as he righted all the bottles.

She and Adeliza exchanged knowing looks. 

With the fourth bottle, Thomas found what he was looking for.

“This is the one. This is the scent you were wearing at Wintersloe’s wedding.”

“How on God’s earth do you remember that? And what did I tell you about wearing shoes in my bed?”

Thomas promptly pried his shoes off using only his feet and swept them over the side of the bed. 

“Which is this?”

Adeliza leaned backwards to smell the bottle Thomas held out as she deftly knotted Miranda in at the same time. 

“Sandalwood and damask rose.”

“Sandalwood and damask rose,” he sang to himself as he let a drop fall into each of his gloves. “How much longer, my dear? We are going to be frightfully late.”

Miranda turned around dressed only in a plain shift and the stay, her hands on her hips.

“Well, your hair is magnificent.”

She rolled her eyes. 

Adeliza returned with a box that was nearly as large as her. Thomas set the tray aside and sat up for the unveiling. She laid out on the bed a gown of pearlescent, rose gold taffeta embroidered with pink, green, and blue flowers. The pleated cuffs were trimmed with plaits adorned with many-colored silk skeins twisted loosely into small soft buds. Thomas had an eye for discrete materials, but Miranda was the one who had the mind to put order to them all and assemble something beautiful.

Thomas lay down next to it and draped a sleeve over his arm. “How do we look, Miss Adeliza?”

His own suit was an impressive match. The gold metallic thread edging the coat’s pattern of linden leaves glimmered in the candle light. The plackets of his velvet waistcoat were embellished with beaded and embroidered ostrich feathers.

“Oh, Lord Thomas.”

“Ignore him. He just wants attention. Come on, husband. You’ve officially become a nuisance.” 

She and Adeliza pulled him off the bed and steered him out of the room.

“I guess I’ll be in the drawing room then, alone and sniffing my glo —” 

The door shut in his face.

“My shoes!”

The house of Lord Tellner, the fifth Duke of Eastholm and the second Duke of Durnlay, was twice the size of the Hamiltons’ residence, and that evening it contained all of high society at present in London. As they wended through the heaving crowd of strangulated bosoms and roving hands, the wigged and the powdered greeted them with exuberant laughter and squeals of flattery. Miranda and Thomas tightened the smiles on their faces and their grips on each other’s arms. After clearing the first gantlet, Thomas made a grab for two glasses of wine, leaving Miranda to corner a harried footman to acquire one for herself. As long as the supply of alcohol was bottomless and the music good, their fortitude was mostly guaranteed. After Thomas finished the second glass of his first pair of drinks, Lady Tellner waved her handkerchief at them from the other side of the great room. 

“My darling Hamiltons! My clever Hamiltons!”

Lady Tellner proceeded to breathlessly complain that half the participants of her dance were already stumbling drunk and beseeched them to replace the worst two. Having arrived so very, _very_ fashionably late, they were of the few sober enough to capably avoid significant bodily collisions. Before they could respond, she hustled them into the ballroom and inserted them into opposing lines with several other guests between them. 

“You’re a dear!” she whispered into Thomas’s ear from behind with her hands a little too low on his waist. 

Miranda wiggled her eyebrows at him. Thomas mouthed an unmistakable _NO_.

The dance would commence after the customary bow. Miranda and Thomas narrowed their eyes at each other, signaling that their private competition to see who could bow the deepest was about to commence as well. In preparation, Thomas stretched each calf while Miranda executed a few knee bends. The first notes on the harpsichord struck, and they began their slow descent. With his face nearly to the floor and his tendons straining in agony, Thomas was forced to yield first lest he lose his balance and break his nose a second time. After accepting his concession, Miranda exhaled with great relief when she was finally able to rise out of her curtsy with the aid of the women flanking her.

As they whirled around in a battery of thrashing gowns and fans, they turned their heads to each other as the other dancers turned their bodies the other way and assessed their respective partners. They expressed joking approval with winks and disapproval with crossed eyes. Their heads then spinning from too much eye-crossing, they extricated themselves from the dance in a flurry of overlapping excuses. They retreated to the library, which usually made for a more promising hunting ground. There they knew they would find the guests, who were less interested in being seen as wanting to be seen, and more interested in being able to hear their own conversations.

A footman entered the room with more wine, and Thomas athletically swooped in with open hands. This time of one of the glasses was intended for Miranda. They cordially toasted each other, drank their fill, then parted in opposite directions, setting out separately to reconnoiter the room. After a few hours of chatting and appraising the other guests, they reunited at their starting point.

“Wife, have you spied your prey? How deep in the bush is he?”

“Husband, I have.”

“He? Lady Llewellyn says his family tree is more like a family obelisk.”

“So then, husband, whose fine form has captured your discriminating eye?”

“Lo, by the Willem Wissing.”

“Captain Churchleigh?”

“There is so much to be said about a uniform. The order, the discipline. And all those buttons. How they might feel pressed against one’s back.”

“You’re certain you would want a seaman all over your new suit?”

Thomas walked a slow circle around Miranda before resting his chin on her shoulder. “There.”

“Ohhh, husband! Well done, well done.”

“Who will discover anon what lies betwixt those sumptuous thighs? How many times did his tailor prick himself when he first stitched his inseam?”

“How can you tell? All I glimpsed was a pair of shapely ankles.”

“See how insouciantly confident he is? He can be so, because he knows he has no competition from the other peacocks.”

“I think I see of what you speak.”

“Alas, wife, odds of course are in your favor.”

“Well, husband, what subject should I broach?”

“Horsemanship naturally.”

Miranda gave his arm a gentle squeeze.

“Oh, Thomas, don’t be despondent. The hunt never ends.”

“I suppose it’ll be me and Priapus once again.”

Miranda tilted her head.

“I have Priapus. Prosymnus is in your room, I believe.”

With her trophy secured, Thomas hired a hack so that she could have their carriage in private.

It would be a couple of hours before the sun rose, and Thomas was still sitting up in his bed, sullenly looking at Prosymnus, one of the two solid glass objects he and Miranda purchased in Venice. Priapus was a tad longer and more curved, which suited Miranda’s tastes, but that night she had no need for it. The muffled sounds from her room died down some time ago. The silence was periodically punctuated by her laughter. Thomas sighed heavily as he rolled Prosymnus against the arch of his aching foot.

A single knock came at the door that connected his room to Miranda’s. It was followed by a sequence of knocks that informed Thomas it was her.

Clad only in her shift and her hair appropriately mussed and loose around her shoulders, she stood in the doorway with a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Was everything to your satisfaction, my dear?” Thomas asked.

“Can we have a moment of your time, or are you thus…occupied?”

“Ah.” Thomas looked at the object in hand, which he then slipped under a pillow. “‘We’?”

She reached behind herself and stepped further into his room. At the end of her arm was her guest from the ball. Thomas’s eyes traveled from Miranda’s wicked little smirk to the scalloped-lace cravat that concealed the young man’s eyes. He did wonder where that cravat had gone to.

“I brought you a present on this special occasion.”

“I see. With such a pretty ribbon as well.” 

And nothing else. 

_Oh, wife._

“As you can see, your earlier conjecture about our friend here has proven to be accurate.”

“Yeeeesss,” Thomas intoned, stretching the word out to mask his lack of a coherent response.

He swung his legs over the side of bed. Miranda steered the man towards him until he was positioned between his knees.

She blew him a kiss as she headed back to her room.

“Happy Pentecost Day, my love.”

It was possible the evening might conclude with him speaking in tongues.

The man found Thomas’s arms. His hands slowly moved up to his shoulders and up his neck to cup his face. They seemed large enough to encompass his whole head. Thomas turned and pressed his lips against his wrist. It had been some time since he was last held like this.

“You certainly are…agreeable.”

Thomas placed his hands flat on the planes of his smooth chest. His eyes studied his splendid figure before settling further below.

He knew length alone in that state didn’t always tell the whole story, but how impressive his was. He could see from the width of the base and the volume of skin still gathered around the head that this one was a beast. Fully aroused, it was probably like a separate animal unto itself, demanding pets and kisses before it tore one to pieces. Thomas’s mind twinged with apprehension at the prospect of testing the limits of his threshold, but his body apparently was less concerned as evidenced by the protrusion lifting the hem of his shirt.

“You may take that bloody thing off now.”

The man laughed a clear, deep laugh that Thomas felt in his loins. He tossed the cravat aside, revealing warm hazel eyes, and hiked himself onto Thomas’s lap.

“Well then.”

Thomas grabbed him by the waist and flipped him onto his back, pushing him into the bedding with a kiss.

“Good evening, Lord Thomas Hamilton.”

“Good evening…”

“Archibald Bertwistle.”

“…Archibald Bertwistle,” Thomas repeated, his tongue and lips mashing against his teeth to say this appalling combination of letters.

“Oh, you’re the Earl of Coventry’s youngest. I went to school with your brother Percival. Is he doing well? And his wife…Mary, is it?”

Archibald laid a finger on Thomas’s lips.

“Shhh.”

Thomas smiled against it before taking it into his mouth then slowly withdrawing from it. He raked a knuckle down his breastbone and followed that lovely line down his abdomen.

“Now, Archibald, why don’t you fill me with the Holy Spirit.”

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas awoke to the sound of dripping water and the slow scrape of a blade being dragged over his scalp. Doubled over but held fast to a chair, he could see that his groin had also been shaved. If anyone had been that close to his cock with a razor, he was glad he wasn’t conscious for the act but not particularly glad that any of this was occurring at all. If his tongue wasn’t stuck to the dry roof of his mouth, he would have lodged a complaint.

Once it seemed his head was adequately shorn, a bucket of cold water was turned over him. As it ran into his mouth, ungluing it, he began to shout. Another bucket followed, choking off his torrent of swears and threats. He shook furiously. With cold and with rage. The restraint around his arms and chest was loosened, and he fell forward, his legs unresponsive. As he lay on the flagstone floor, he was ordered to dress. Looking past the legs beside him, he saw hanging from hooks a shirt and trousers of coarse undyed linen alongside a shapeless wool coat. 

“Get up.”

His chattering teeth minced his reply into fragments of noise. _To. Leave. I. Need._

He pulled himself up onto his elbows and turned his head in the amniotic mire he seemed to be submerged in. In the corner of the room, the clothes he was previously wearing lay in a pile on the floor. These he could remember, the colors and fabrics like sign posts along an unfamiliar road. The cornflower blue velvet suit with the honeycomb stitching and the ivory brocade waistcoat with the peony pattern. They were torn in places, bloodied in others, and soaked through with the same gray water he was lying in.

It was a pitiful sight. He was quite fond of that suit. He had changed into it for dinner. Dinner he was having with Miranda. Miranda who was wearing the garnet-colored gown and the emerald pendant for contrast. They were served lamb with currants. A bake of artichokes. He could still smell the butter and the mace, and the smoke from the extinguished candles.

When he was roused again, he was sitting in another chair, clothed this time, in another room. This room at least was dry and did not stink of wet leather and stone. A small fire warmed his skin, but he shivered still, the cold in his bones now. His eyes were drawn upwards to a painting high on the wall before him. There was Christ, all aglow, baring his smooth ivory torso to a rather familiar-looking figure. Thomas squinted. Was that him thrusting his fingers into the son of God’s flapping wound?

His eyes arced down, and suddenly there was a desk. He kicked it to make sure it was real. The throbbing of his toe confirmed that both it and he were. A man sat behind it. He appeared to be composed of entirely circles. Round of nose, round of head, round of torso. Perhaps the painting was asking Thomas to have faith in this stranger, who was so free of angles, and his horsehair wig.

“You are a physician? A man of medicine? Of science?” Thomas croaked. He swallowed down an incipient retch before continuing. “Did you pull me from my grave? I have dirt in my…”

He removed his fingers from Christ’s side and inserted them into his mouth.

“I see you’re still in quite a heightened state of agitation.”

The man swept his hand at Thomas. He looked down at the damp and stained bandages that were wrapped around his forearms. Unable to recall the events that led to the injuries, his breath quickened with panic.

“What did you to me?”

“What did we do? You were already in a mania by the time you arrived, Mr. Hamlin. As you know, murder of the self is not only a sin in the eyes of God, it is a crime. You are fortunate your father delivered you here before you could fully commit yourself to this shameful and unlawful act.”

“You are telling me I did this. To myself?” The idea was beyond preposterous, but he had no explanation of his own.

“We here have seen it many times before. Men who become afflicted due to the infidelity of weak-minded, unprincipled women. As for you, well, not only an unfaithful wife but an unfaithful friend. Typically these affairs result in injury to the cuckold-maker, not the cuckold himself, but your father informed us you have an especially sensitive nature. Your tribulation must have seemed so great as to be unbearable.”

“Cuckold, cuckold,” Thomas mumbled to himself. “Unprincipled? Unbearable?” He chuckled bitterly. “Unbelievable.”

“You think that grief could drive a man to madness is unbelievable? Hospitals and graveyards are full of these cases. So much literature and art founded on this. Passions such as grief, they can fester, become bilious and poison the mind. This place means to bring yours to order, and we will see you through this. Safely and in good faith.” 

“Please.”

The man cocked his head.

“Please stop talking.” Thomas’s thoughts were devolving into vibrating strings of frustration. “Nonsense. Drivel. Lies. I should not be here. I should be…”

Thomas scratched, digging his nails in deep. Spots of fresh blood bloomed on the bandages.

“You are most troubled indeed. With a case like yours, I would prefer to begin a regimen of treatments immediately, but you will need to rest before we can evaluate your fitness for them.”

“And then?” Thomas asked.

The man cocked his head back the other way.

“And then?” Thomas repeated.

“The process takes time. Results are not swift or even guaranteed, but we always strive for the restoration of our patients’ wellbeing. Depending on the individual though, balance can be a very precarious thing.”

Thomas cleared his throat. “In other words, as long as my father pays for my confinement…I am to remain here.”

The man gestured again at Thomas’s arms.

“You are unwell, and he is your father.”

Thomas vehemently shook his head. Even if this assessment was correct, he disagreed with the choice of conjunction. “Because” not “and.” Unfortunately he could not argue the latter clause.

“We will begin tomorrow. Today though, rest.”

Thomas jumped in his chair when a hand came down his shoulder. Two men were standing behind him. One jutted his chin towards the door, the presumption of idiocy already applied to him. His legs were not too far from the rest of his body, so he was able to leave the room of his own volition this time. The men shadowed him closely until they were a safe distance from the office.

They walked in formation towards the end of the gallery. As they passed a series of doors, spectral noises wafted from their peepholes. When they reached their destination, the guard bashed a key into the lock and swung the door open.

“’S’yours.”

“’S’mine.”

“Your bed. Your piss pot. Your cup. Do yourself a favor and don’t confuse ‘em. You heard me?”

Thomas scratched his arms. None of these things were his though. _Mine_ was not this small room with its small barred window and its thick wooden door with its even smaller barred window. These clothes weren’t even his, nor was this hair. He might have been convinced that they had also enrobed him in another’s ill-fitting skin. He scratched and scratched as if could uncover his real life hidden underneath.

“Yes, I heard you. Thank you.”

The men left him and sauntered back down the gallery. The door was left open so he chose not to remain in the cell. _His_ cell.

Past the entrance hall he could see a mirror image of the gallery he stood in. Arched doors multiplied before his eyes, lining one side of the entire length of the building like a row of brown teeth. He could hear from his neighboring cell a curious noise and peeked around its door. Inside a balding, rail-thin man was pulling his bed away from the wall and panting from his exertions.

“Good day.”

The man turned his head towards Thomas and smiled.

“A good day indeed, indeed. I am Peter, and you are new.”

“No, I’m Thomas.”

“Oh, now what is the matter?”

“I know a Peter.”

“Blimey, I know three. I guess I win.”

Thomas winced. His right heel rose, preparing itself to take a sizable step to the side.

“No need to worry, Tom. I’m not like the hair eaters and the baby drowners here. If you must, you can call me Peter-Peter, or call your Peter Peter-Peter.”

“May I ask…”

“Why’m I here?”

“I hate to be so forward, but…”

“Ah, well.” He sat cross-legged on his bed and absentmindedly scratched his pocked arms. “I suffer from these spells. They got worse as I got older. They cause me to shake and spit like I got the devil in me. So here I am with my fellow damned.”

“Have you?”

“What?”

“The devil in you?”

Peter laughed hoarsely. His face crossed into the light that came through his window. His pallor closely matched its cold colorlessness. 

“If I had the devil in me, I like to think I’d do more than dodder like a broken bird. I was once a clerk at the Bank.” He made a walking motion with his fingers. “Just a brisk perambulation from here. And what’d you do?”

“I’m the eldest son of the Earl of Ashbourne.”

“Hm, that sounds like a state of being, not an act of doing.”

“I committed acts he found objectionable.”

“Your reluctance to say certainly has piqued my curiosity. Take advantage of a lady, did you? Fancy yourself the Ottoman Emperor? Talk to ghosts? Many here are partial to that.”

“Nothing of the sort. I pushed for legislation that would require the state to reconsider the crimes of an unreasonably maligned group of people in order for society as a whole to move forward productively and with dignity, to which my father took such great offense that he stole my life from me in order to thwart the possible political aftermath like the worthless, self-serving coward that he is.”

Peter rubbed his chin as he silently mulled over Thomas’s response.

“I’m also a sodomite.”

“Oh! Well, I suppose you could do worse.”

“And how, in your estimation, is that?”

“You could be a Spaniard.”

“Right. I could be a Spaniard.” Thomas slowly backed away. “I must… Perhaps we shall rejoin later?”

“Don’t have a choice there, I’m afraid.”

Thomas nodded then furrowed his brow. He had no appointments to keep, no motions to observe, no social gatherings to attend.

“Bye now, Tom.” Peter stood to resume his pointless task. “Oh. You’re in bedlam now. You don’t have to be the son of an Earl. Awfully middling, don’t you think? Try a Duke. Or a prince.”

Thomas wasn’t sure if this was said entirely in jest, but he nodded, his wish to be the son of another being quite sincere.

An acquaintance once asked him and Miranda to accompany him to Bethlem, but the morbid glee with which he propositioned them turned him from the invitation. As far as Thomas could see, most of the patients slept or sat on their beds, mumbling inaudibly and picking at the plaster walls or themselves. He did not see the insanity of theatre and literature, only a shared dullness to their expressions. He could feel the muscles of his own face rearranging themselves in imitation of it. As he continued down the gallery, past the large windows and the many paintings of Christ in between them, he wondered if his former acquaintance believed he got his tuppence worth.

He stopped in the entrance hall. The doors were wide open, which seemed antithetical to the purpose of the place. A pair of guards stood in the them, idly chatting, their hands resting casually on the cudgels in their belts. He approached them but neither moved to stop him. He hesitantly walked out and down the steps to the front gates where another pair of disinterested guards were stationed. On the other side of the fence was a vast garden of skeletal trees and orderly promenades. He could see a gentleman with his mastiff and a couple enjoying a constitutional. In the distance, a cluster of people hovered at the entrance to the grounds. He gave the gate an exploratory shake, earning him his first threat of a beating.

Thomas turned back towards the building and studied its dignified, inoffensive facade. He was too young to remember its construction, but he had met its architect, Robert Hooke, shortly before his death, at a meeting of the Royal Society. He was by then an irascible carbuncle, more concerned with his legacy than with Thomas’s questions about his model of memory. Feeling rebuffed, he dedicated himself to drunkenness that evening despite excessive drinking being so destructive to memory. He still managed to ponder, incorrectly most likely, the soul’s implementation of the corporeal in the formation of memories, and, of course, forgetting. Hooke stated that one’s memory could be improved, but Thomas couldn’t remember what he said on that point.

He pulled his coat tighter around himself, but it was too small to button, and the loose weave of the fabric did little to block out the cold. The chill in the air reminded him it was Christmas. Or not quite Christmas. With this realization, he noticed the smell of rosemary and bay when he reentered the building. Sprigs of them held together by ribbon were hung over each office door. An olfactory respite from the stink of piss and coal smoke.

He had become lost in the memories of mince pies and spiced wine, when he heard them, animated voices filling the space around him. The gaggle of finely dressed ladies and gentlemen he noticed earlier began to gather in the entrance hall. Thomas’s eyes darted wildly about as they filed past him. The colors and textures they brought into the drab, joyless space struck his senses like hammers. As they milled around, his eyes honed in on curls of dark hair and the slopes of broad shoulders. He was looking for them. In every stranger, he sought them out. Their clothes suddenly became James’s and Miranda’s clothes, and their faces became James’s and Miranda’s faces. Jameses and Mirandas peering into the peepholes, laughing, chipping a penny at someone’s feet. But they were not there to take him home. Even with their eyes, they did not see him.

Dread poured into the hollow spaces in his chest. As more people entered the building, instinct urged him to hide. He started up the staircase across from the entrance but was met with a cudgel to the chest. 

“You lot aren’t permitted up here.”

“But…” Thomas frantically looked around the hall.

The guard sized him up then snorted derisively. “No one’s going to know you from Adam. Now off the fucking stairs.”

He didn’t know who he was, knew not how he looked before, but he knew that with certainty. No one would know he was. Thomas stepped down backwards into the crowd, bumping into a woman who flung herself into her husband’s arms in giddy fright. That woman was not Miranda, and that man was not James. They were both gone.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Peter’s eyes searched for a safe place to settle on Thomas as he took the chair next to his in the porter’s office. Failing to find one, they landed on the clothbound box he placed on the small table between them.

“What need do I have for a mirror, when I have the expression on your face? Is my appearance that fearsome?” 

Peter’s attempt at a reassuring smile failed. Thomas chuckled at the contorted grimace-grin he made instead. After his laughter faded, they fell into silence, his scratching the only sound in the room.

Peter cleared his throat. 

“It is surprising.” He pushed the box closer to Thomas. “Mrs. Carrington wanted you to have this. She heard you were unwell.”

“Yes, I can smell that it is her gingerbread. Bless your Mrs. Carrington, always so generous. Unfortunately with all these concoctions they have me ingest, and the paregoric I need afterwards, I simply haven’t the stomach for much of anything I’m afraid.”

“You must take care of yourself.”

“But I thought I was here to be taken care of as I do not have wherewithal to control myself. Lord Almighty, the nonsense they speak, and they all speak it. How long am I to stay here, because I’m not sure how much more I can tolerate.”

“That unfortunately is up to your father. He is…you father is… You ought to know, your father and Admiral Hennessey — “

“Say whatever it is you have to say.”

“Miranda and the lieutenant have left London. Left England. They’re on their way to New Providence Island as we speak.”

Thomas slumped in the chair. Feeling drained from him, washing out through his feet. When Peter placed a hand on his shoulder, it slammed back into him like a breaking wave. The smell of the gingerbread. The paregoric. The bile that still clung to his back teeth. He rested his head on his knees to quell the urge to vomit. 

He was now truly alone, but his worst fear was allayed. James would not be hanged.

“They’re together. They will take care of each other as you wanted.”

“They are safe?” he asked into his lap. “Please tell me they are safe.”

“Unfortunately it will be months before I get word of their arrival.”

“God, god, god. Please, God. Keep them safe. Please, God.”

He slowly righted himself. 

“And you, Peter? Has he moved against you? Of course he knew of your advocacy on my behalf.”

“Don’t concern yourself with me. You have enough on your mind as it is.”

Thomas suppressed an acidic belch and started coughing. What a sight he must have made.

“How can my father diminish me in such ruthless ways?”

“You know your father. To him this is a practical means to an end.”

Thomas tugged at the fraying edge of a bandage.

“I am truly sorry, Thomas. As his child, I suppose you needed to believe there was a limit to his cruelty.”

“So I am mad, and this is where I rightfully belong.”

“At this point, all you can do is wait — “

“Wait?”

“The situation in the Bahamas could improve, and the need for a — “

Thomas lurched forward, vomiting at their feet.

“Perhaps we…” Peter’s shoes retreated from the mess. “Another time.”

Thomas spat. “Time. Yes, perhaps. Another. Another.”

He managed to accompany Peter to the gates, where they embraced like brothers. A divine shaft of light shone through a break in the clouds and onto the gardens. Thomas listened to the bustle of the city, the clatter and rattle of hoofs and carriage wheels, and the calls of the street merchants hawking chickens and pottery. Peter put his hands in his coat pockets, adopting a leisurely pose, and strolled down the mall towards the road.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

“It appears to not be thick or tough or earthy or even black to me. Is blackness considered the minimum qualification for…whatever it is that ails me? What did you say ails me? Can you be more specific than that? As so many of the patients here seem to suffer from that very same thing. What is your criteria for toughness or thickness as it applies to liquids though? Does it consider blancmange as a model for — ”

“Mr. Hemmings, quiet down! This heated constitution of yours must be responsible for this mindless prattling. It needs to be calmed before you lapse into mad fury once more.”

“Mad fury?”

Talman pressed on Thomas’s arm just so, and the sloppy rivulet of blood tidied itself into a neat arc. It was hardly the fountain at Hampton Court Palace, but Thomas gazed at it as if it were. It was unmistakably red, not black, nor in some in-between state like custard. His assistant swished it around in a white earthenware bowl, and Thomas became mesmerized by the swirl of his blood and its deep, vivid hue. The fainter he got, the more luscious, almost potable, it appeared, not unlike a nice claret. Talman and his assistant discussed the state of his blood in hushed and serious tones. When Thomas’s words dwindled into silence, they deemed the therapy a success.

He staggered out into the corridor and was led upstairs to the main floor. With the bloodlettings, he staggered more than he walked, having adopted the asylum’s unofficial gait. As he made his way fitfully down the gallery, a pair of maid servants approached him. They carried a large, ungainly basket between them and blocked his path.

One reached into it and, from beneath cheesecloth, produced a slice of pudding that was greasy with suet.

“Thank you. What is this for?”

“It’s the new year.”

It had hardly been more than a fortnight. This knowledge made him wobble.

The older maid stopped to appraise the state of him. As she manhandled him, tugging at his sleeves and flapping his coat about, Thomas felt like a child again, that little animal who could do no right but always received the unsolicited care of women.

“This is far too small for him. He can’t even shut it. And, look, Miss Eve, the cuffs don’t even reach his wrists. This won’t do at all.”

He stared at her, searching her face. He wished he had the faculties to say how she reminded him of his old nurse, and how sorry he was for having been so much trouble to her.

After she released him, he walked to the far end of the women’s wing, where he had made a spot facing a small painting of a Dutch hunting party his. The galleries were bereft of any seating, so like many others, he sat on the floor and picked at the cake. By doing so he was sure they looked all the more pitiable in the eyes of the holiday visitors. As entertainment, his desire to discuss the questionable methods of the residing officers could never compete with Chloris lifting her skirts.

The cake was no where near as good as Matilda’s plum pudding with its excessive amount of rum, but he ate it out of boredom and wondered if the truly mad experienced boredom too. He thought maybe that was why he was drawn to this painting. It had an energetic quality that those depicting the almighty power of a half-nude God or the benevolence of his doe-eyed son lacked. While it appeared incongruous, he liked to think the bloodthirsty scene aligned with the belief that one could nourish himself on Christ’s love as if it was meat to eat.

On Sundays, a clergyman came to perform service, and many attended for the mad seemed particularly disposed to religion, but Thomas chose to pray before this painting of men with swords and ravening dogs instead. After his prayer for the strength to persevere and his prayer for Miranda and James’s safe passage across the ocean, he also uttered in the same voice a prayer that his father be hunted down and cut to pieces.

He separated his hands as if they had been closed around the flame of a candle for too long. He tried to will them into stillness by placing them on his head, now bristly with growth. The nap had a velvety quality that he sometimes touched to distraction, and it was just enough to calm his tremors.

It was nice to have some softness in such a coarse place, but the short hairs outlined old injuries he was content with having forgotten. Spills he took while riding; a rock thrown by a ghastly cousin. Towards the back was the new addition, a finger-length wound held closed by thread. How he acquired this one he still couldn’t recall, along with those that striated his forearms. The scab had begun to flake and itched mercilessly. On those sleepless nights, the urge to scratch grew into the urge to tear out the stitches, dig his fingernails in beneath the gash’s edge, and strip his skull clean of his scalp.

His blood might not have been black, but something in him was.

Without them, he was already losing himself. He wondered if his love was so weak that it could not hold them to him. If he so weak that he needed them preserve his shape.

Just as his fingertips crept toward the wound again, a body stepped in between him and the painting, sending his monstrous thoughts to scatter like roaches.

“You in there?”

Thomas couldn’t answer.

“I had a right time finding you.”

Thomas let go of his head. It was the woman from before, holding out a coat to him. He grabbed the wainscot cap on the wall he was sitting against and clumsily hoisted himself to his feet. He removed the one he was wearing, and she helped him into the new one. Thomas wanted to ask her to stay and sit beside him, tell him all there was to know about her, but once she saw the fit was to her satisfaction, she briskly moved on to her next chore.

  

  

  

  


	3. Chapter 3

Thomas looked down at the granite paving slab he was standing on.

_On this Site in the Year 1705 stood Lieutenant James McGraw of Her Majesty’s Naval Service and the Honourable Lord Thomas Hamilton at the Founding of their sublime and eternal Union_

Miranda might have suggested that it was premature to wish for an engraved commemoration of his first meeting with James, and the size of the slab would have necessitated fewer words, but Thomas knew nothing could possibly be truer or more enduring than their recently consummated union.

This hallowed site was where Thomas awaited James now after canceling the rest of the day’s appointments. An obstinate days-long fever, he explained to his father’s clerk. A very terrible, very hot fever, which set his blood aflame and his heart to race, robbed him unrelentingly of his breath and sleep, addled his mind with fantastic visions, and —

“My lord, I will cancel them and have the appropriate parties notified. Please, do see to your ill health.”

From Thomas’s vantage point on the landing, the naval officers who gathered outside of the Admiralty resembled magpies, one indistinguishable from the next. He agonized that he could not discern James from the other men and became convinced it was due to their bond of love already waning. He secretly cursed every passing parliamentarian who stopped to exchange pleasantries with him, leaching his attention away from the assembly across the road. He then nauseated himself with the thought that James was not even among them and did not share his sense of urgency for a mid-day rendezvous.

When he caught sight of that stroke of red hair, his unease was replaced by the temptation to tear down the steps so that he might reach him sooner. He twisted his signet ring around his finger instead. He hated moments like this, when distance and patience were required.

James finally broke away from his associates, and all that disordered Thomas’s mind withdrew ahead of his advance. He bounded up the steps and warbled a cheery whistle at him. It was a sweet little sound that made Thomas fit to burst with happiness. Seeing this strong, upstanding officer so confident in his stride, in his intelligence and experience, so resolute in his beliefs, and forceful with his commands, dressed in his full uniform made him fit to burst with other feelings as well. Buttoned up, laced up, and tied up, every inch of him a testament to an exquisite control he dreamed of peeling away layer by layer.

Thomas sat back on James’s thighs and tapped his lip in contemplation. His eyes traveled from the top of James’s head to the head of his cock, charting a meandering but purposeful course. Intent on exploring and mapping the pleasures of the body beneath him, Thomas asked what it was that he enjoyed.

“Supplementary to…” Thomas carried out a series of obscene gestures.

James chewed on the question. It was clearly one that was never posed to him before.

“Your nose?” Thomas asked as he touched James’s nose. Even the feel of its point against the pad of his fingertip sent signals flying to his groin.

“My nose? What could you do with a nose? Other than — ”

James pressed said nose against Thomas’s wrist and inhaled deeply.

“Suck on it. Lick your nostrils,” he answered with a shrug.

“Lick my nostrils? Has it ever occurred to you that a hole is sometimes just a hole? I would rather you did not suck on my nose. I suspect you would intentionally leave a mark. Or lick my nostrils. No, not my nose. I do like it behind your ear, but I gain no carnal satisfaction from that.”

“So the ear then?”

“The earlobe? I have known women who appreciated a nibble there.”

Thomas tugged on James’s earlobe with his teeth, but this produced no reaction. Neither did a lick nor a gentle suck. He put some distance between them in order to study the aloof organ. The curves of the petal-like folds guided his eye almost deliberately to the hole of his ear, so he leaned in and dipped the tip of his tongue into the pink well. James flinched. Then, like a cat, he nudged the side of his face against Thomas’s nose. He returned his tongue to his ear and softly traced the external canal.

“And what of that?”

“That was not an unpleasurable experience.”

“Duly noted.”

James furrowed his brow as Thomas considered with great deliberation the next leg of the journey.

“Thomas, perhaps we can defer this — “

He grabbed his hands and threw them over his head. James’s mouth slackened.

Thomas rubbed circles on the tender skin of James’s wrists with his thumbs while he slowly rocked his hips back and forth, working his erection against his. He ran his fingertips down the undersides of his arms, through the hair of his armpits, and over his ribs. A shiver ran through his body. The slight snap of his hips between Thomas’s thighs sharpened his already highly focused state. He returned his fingers to his wrists to repeat the motion but this time with his fingernails. James hissed, his head rising from the pillow then dropping back. Thomas sat back up again, a laugh rumbling deep in his throat, and twisted James’s nipples every so slightly. With his fingers firmly in place, he squeezed them gradually harder and harder.

“No — “

Thomas immediately released them. “I am so — ”

He frantically kissed his apologies all over James’s face. As his lips drifted down the hard column of his neck, regret ceded ground to desire, and by the time they reached his chest, Thomas was no longer so repentant. He took the left nipple in his mouth and lightly sucked. James yielded a soft gasp and a jerk of the hips. He leisurely rolled the tip around his tongue. James yielded a squirm and a toss of the head to the side. Thomas smiled to himself with his nipple between his lips. He feasted on these moments and only hungered for more of them. He laid his tongue flat against James’s skin before flicking the nub of flesh in rapid succession.

James arched his back and moaned behind his teeth.

“Jesus. Thomas…”

He raised his hips, struggling to gain friction between their cocks. His hand came around the both of them, but Thomas retreated down his legs and out of reach, eliciting a growl of protest. He had shifted his attention to James’s navel and settled on his knees in a position more advantageous to observing it. As another one of his holes, Thomas naturally assumed there had to be more than mere visual appeal. He would have been well pleased to simply stare at it and let it intrude on his thoughts later as old men squabbled about the Scots, but discoveries needed to be made.

James huffed, this literal navel-gazing exhausting the last of his patience. He rolled Thomas onto his back, whipped his shirt off, and decidedly put his metaphors out of their misery by wrapping his lips around his cock.

It was not the worst way to cut an expedition short.

James’s nose came to rest behind Thomas’s ear. They were lying in each other’s arms, half-asleep but fully dreaming. The sun had begun to melt across the slate rooftops, reminding them it was time to return to the house.

“Thomas.”

“Mm?”

“We should…”

“Mm.”

James reluctantly got up to gather their clothes, which had been left carelessly strewn about the room, and laid them out on the bed to sort through.

Even though he had twice the buttons Thomas had, he always dressed in far less time than he did. That evening Thomas was being especially idle, preferring to lie back partially attired and watch James tuck his shirt in than ready himself. As Miranda surely would have understood, any opportunity to indulge in the sight of his hand dipping inside the waist of his breeches was worth being a little late to supper for.

After James buckled his belt, Thomas leaped from the bed to help him into his coat. He took a clothes brush to his shoulders while James straightened his cravat.

“I feel like a squire helping a knight into his armor.”

James chuckled. “I have never hurt for assistance with dressing. Unlike…”

“You see me as some pampered and helpless Spaniel Gentle, I suppose.”

“You missed a button on your breeches, and your garter has fallen below the cuff of the right leg,” James stated plainly. “If you were on my ship, I would have had you flogged for such flagrant sloppiness.”

Thomas stepped back and put his hands on his hips.

“The cheek of you. I will report this impertinence to Admiral Hennessey, and then we shall see who gets flogged.”

He smacked James on the backside with the handle of the brush.

“Oh, shall we?”

James spun around and easily wrestled the brush away from Thomas before giving chase. There was hardly room to run, and with just a few nimble maneuvers, James had Thomas bent over the foot of the bed.

_Thwack._

“Ja-ames!” Thomas exclaimed, laughing breathlessly.

James pointed the brush at him. “Get dressed, or I will leave you here to dine with Mrs. Miller and her inbred cats.”

“Aye, aye, Lieutenant,” he muttered as he rubbed the sting from his rear.

Thomas buttoned himself properly and tucked the garter back up into his breeches. He raised his cravat high above his head, almost touching the ceiling, and pulled it taut. He pointed his foot forward and lowered the cloth around his neck, putting on a show for his slightly baffled lover, but after a minute of fumbling and fussing, he grumbled, “Damn this thing.” 

He yanked it away from his collar and marched over to the small mirror on the wall, mangling the fabric in frustration.

“Thomas, Thomas.” James took the cravat from him and smoothed it from the center out.

“It’s…I prefer it creased in the middle. I cannot seem to…” Thomas sighed. “It’s a marvel to me how Mr. Houghton executes it perfectly every time.”

“I guess I was mistaken in thinking you had such clever fingers. You have an additional pair of hands at your disposal. Surely between the two of us, we can have the cravat the way my lord demands it.”

Thomas winced at the remark.

James held the cravat out before him, and he made his preferred crease. He placed the material against Thomas’s throat, crossed the ends over at his nape then brought them back to the front. He loosely knotted them together and tucked the longer end up behind the knot then drew it over. He adjusted Thomas’s collar, taking care to ensure the two points sufficiently overlapped so no gapping could occur. With intense focus, he neatly arrayed the fine linen over Thomas’s chest before buttoning his waistcoat over it. 

Thomas, on the verge of tears, stared at him in awe.

“There,” James said with the slightest smile.

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

_How the melancholy grips him still. His sleep interrupted, his appetite dulled. Such a stubborn…tenacious…distemper. An imbalance of…black — no, yellow bile. It is. In the spleen? Oh, no, no, no. The gallbladder? In our most virtuous attempts to treat his passions, perhaps he now suffers from an excess of choler. Not melancholy? An excess of choler if not made mild can convert into melancholy, the most viscous of the humors. Look at the drawn, sallow appearance he has taken on. He continues to lie in a liminal state, oh, somewhere between illness and…health. What can we do for the poor wretch? If God has not seen fit to heal him through Nature, we must keep trying in His stead._

Thomas could smell wine on Talman’s breath.

He did miss wine something terrible.

“It could be said with far more brevity that you consider me unimproved.”

Talman released Thomas’s lower left eyelid, and his assistant his ear. They both peered at him with curiosity.

“I have been repeatedly subjected to the same regimen of treatments that have thus far only resulted in sickness, injury, and sloth. I am not a physician, I know, but those do not seem to me to be the hallmarks of therapeutic efficacy. Might you consider a novel approach? Or none at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can I simply forgo? I do not believe you have actually given Nature a chance to play its role in my recovery.”

“But your melancholy, Mr. Hampton. Does it not trouble you?”

“It is not the melancholy that troubles me,” Thomas said, frustration heating his voice. He gestured to the scabbed-over blisters on his arms, unable to point to the larger ones on his back. 

“You are aware that there is usually a modicum of discomfort with treatment.”

“This ‘modicum of discomfort’ is the treatment.”

“Blistering draws any ill humors towards the inflamed areas and provides means of egress for them. It is very effective in restoring balance.”

“All it seems to be effective in is having more doubt cast upon your methodology.” Thomas scratched around the wounds. “And making me quite irritable.”

“Of course we have a remedy for your irritation.”

Thomas deflated. He admonished himself for his careless words, knowing what would result from them. One of Talman’s assistants presented that all too familiar bottle to him. Thomas stood and headed towards the door, but his exit was blocked by a guard.

“Perhaps a bloodletting is the more reasonable option,” Thomas suggested as he looked directly into the guard’s eyes.

“You have missed too many meals for that. We would not want to cause another swoon.”

“God forbid we have another swoon!”

The guard lunged at him and slammed him into the chair. Once the assistants secured the restraint around him, the guard wrapped an arm around his crown and the other around his lower jaw to stay his head. His nose was held shut until his mouth fell open. The laudanum, cloying and spiced with cloves, hit the back of his throat. It slid down his gullet as he coughed and gasped for air. When the guard unbound him, he fell forward onto his hands and knees, his body still teeming with fight. He shoved the chair away as he got to his feet. He straightened his clothes and calmly left the room.

The guard led Thomas by the elbow to the staircase. He suspected they administered a larger dose than normal. He was already peeling away from the inner walls of his carapace like an overcooked lobster. 

He stopped short at the bottom step and stared at it. The guard jabbed him in the back to move along, but he had become preoccupied with listening to his blood as it coursed through his veins. Another jab prompted his lumbering ascent. Thomas could feel the shapes of his thoughts and the emotions of his teeth but not the steps beneath his feet or the bannister in his hand. When he emerged onto the main floor, he heard Dagmar’s voice enter the labyrinth of his ear from the other side of the building.

“Hang sorrow,” she sang off-key. “Let’s cast care away!”

So a new year had begun. The offices were scented with rosemary and bay again, and another pair of maids was blocking his path.

Thomas stood over them, unmoving, unable to decide which way to go.

“You two are different from last year.” He hoped he wasn’t whispering too low to be heard. “You are not Miss Aline.”

The stout one started laughing, which made him question if he said what he thought he said.

“And you are not Miss Edith.”

“No, I am not Miss Edith.”

The other young woman gave him a slice of cake and scuttled away ahead of her partner.

“My name is Thomas, not Miss Edith.”

“I am not not Miss Edith. I am Harriet.”

She handed him another portion before the other maid returned to drag her along.

Thomas entered Peter’s cell to gift him the cake except he was on the floor having one of his spells. Thomas shifted him onto his side with his free hand and slid his chamberpot to the other side of the room with his foot, away from his convulsing body. He sat on his bed and waited. After the episode subsided and Peter regained his bearings, he presented him with the pudding.

“Would it be all right if I lie down in here?”

Peter had already finished it by the end of his question.

“What? Why? The rain get in yours again?”

“No. I…I can’t be alone now. Would you stay in here with me?”

Peter eyed the other piece of cake. Thomas handed it over and curled up on his bed, pulling his coat over his face.

It was the laudanum he dreaded the most, the initial fleeting euphoria never worth what always followed. Each draught seemed to set the clock back to when he arrived at this place, extending his sentence and voiding every forward movement towards an imagined end. He would experience again the same first night of sleep that had been emptied of dreams, and the same stupor that turned his waking life into one. Worse was how it detached him from his own body, making it increasingly a stranger to himself and him increasingly alone.

_Tom._

“Tom. Tom.”

A voice from somewhere and nowhere. There were so many of these voices, including his own.

“I will not,” Thomas murmured mindlessly into his hand. “I shall not.”

He wasn’t ready for the next treatment, the next insipid meal, the next few hours of waiting for one or the other, but the voice persisted.

“You need to get to yours, or they will lock you out. And I should very much like my bed back.”

Without opening his eyes, Thomas groped his way out of Peter’s cell.

“Ooh!” 

His eyes flew open at the high-pitched cry. The maid Harriet was on the floor pinned beneath a basket of laundry. Horrified, Thomas pitched it aside, depleting what little strength he had. He crumpled to the floor next to her in a ragged, wheezing heap. In the middle of his apologetic refrain, he started to fade into unconsciousness again. Hands, small and fat, came around the back of his head, and he fell asleep in the cradle they formed.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

When Harriet and Clarimond made their rounds, Thomas waited by his cell to hear what blessing Harriet had been shown that day, being so short of his own.

“I praised the Lord sixteen times today, because only sixteen of you missed his chamberpot!”

“Small mercies.”

She cackled as she swept the floor outside of his cell.

“No small mercy that. Not at all, not at all. Some think it funny I reckon. Pissing all over themselves, over everything. You know Mr. Fulney? Does it all the time. Awful. Knows not even his own name that one. Not how to dress or feed himself. Like a babe, and we were his mam. One day he’ll not remember how to breathe.”

“Where has he gone though? I have not seen him for weeks.”

Harriet nodded upwards.

“He passed?”

“Oh, no. He’s upstairs. That lot got him now. Now they get to bathe him and all that.”

“There is certainly no shortage of bathing here.”

“Yeah? Mr. Tyson had me help with that once. What a fright. Don’t know how you…” She shook her head at the memory.

“Do you know how to swim?”

“No. Never had the chance to learn.”

“They told me to pretend I was learning how to swim, and the first step is to accustom oneself to holding one’s breath.”

“And that…helps your…um… Does it?”

Thomas laughed but didn’t answer.

“Are you actually mad? Matron said she knew a gentleman here. Nice like. Sharp-witted. You’d never think. One day, he bit a basketman. Right through his nose.”

“Are you concerned that I will bite you?”

The boisterousness of her laughter failed to obscure the nervous strain that ran through it.

“Are you though? Are you mad?”

“Madmen do not believe they are mad, so I think I shall withhold my answer in order to avoid wrongly implicating myself.”

“I was shocked when I started here. To meet so many with good sense. Like you. Enough to work even. Do you want to work?”

“If I can work with you,” Thomas answered with a smile.

“Ha! As if I have a say. But I suppose I could have a word. If matron sees fit to, she can ask the steward. How does that sound?”

“Perfect.”

He grabbed the handles of her basket, shunning her attempts to grab one herself. He followed after her, the difference in height making them a comically lopsided pair. As they continued down the gallery with Clarimond, a guard closely followed, whistling a song Thomas didn’t know. By the time they reached the end, he was humming along.

At sundown, a guard lit the candle in every fourth sconce, offering scant light but enough that Thomas could trace his scars with his finger. He didn’t startle when a key turned in the lock of his door. He waited for it now, after everyone had been secured in their cells for the night. The unfortunately named guard Dunheath stood in the doorway and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. 

Thomas headed unescorted to the end of the gallery where he turned right into a narrow corridor. He carefully walked down an unlit flight of stairs. The guards stationed at the bottom had come to expect him and paid him no mind. He turned into another narrow corridor to take the circular staircase that led to the scullery. Halfway down, he heard singing. The kind of artless, full-throated singing that suggested the singer was alone and not expecting company. Thomas paused on the bottom step to listen. The song was old, a Ravenscroft, like the ones the kitchen maids in Ashbourne sang when he was little and listened, unbeknownst to them, from inside a cupboard.

As she sang “rise rise, rise!” she smacked a kettle with each repetition and giggled to herself.

“Daylight do not burn out.”

She portioned out oats and set large pots on a table, every so often stopping to gauge her progress. She walked over to the food stores and wrapped her thick hands around the corners of a sack. Thomas stepped forward to assist her, the rasp of his clothing alerting her to his presence. She dropped the sack and whirled around. Her eyes widened to take in all of the tall man in chiaroscuro before her. With calm, it appeared to Thomas, so he relaxed his shoulders and took another step, until she shrieked as if with her entire body.

Dunheath barreled down the stairs past Thomas. Harriet rushed into the room from the kitchen. They turned to the maid and then to Thomas before they erupted in laughter.

“Why are you laughing? I nearly died, I did. And what — why is one of them down here?”

“Millicent, you little chicken!” Harriet tapped Thomas’s chest with a wooden spoon. “He’s a good one. Aren’t you, Thomas?”

“That is debatable apparently.”

“Hear how he talks? God save him.” 

“He has come to peel your potatoes, Miss,” Dunheath snickered as he put an arm around Millicent.

“ _My_ potatoes?” she cried as she pushed his arm off.

“Never mind the bloody potatoes.”

Dunheath rummaged around the sacks and behind the casks until he found what he was looking for, a brown onion bottle of no distinction. He sloppily poured it out into four pewter mugs of questionable cleanliness then handed them out. Millicent tentatively drank from hers, while the others tossed the caustic liquid back.

“Probably not what you’re used to, Prince Tom.”

“It’s more than fine.” Thomas laughed and, feeling bold, helped himself to more, grateful to imbibe something other than the sour beer they had with meals.

As the night progressed, more bottles came out of hiding. Millicent, at Dunheath’s urging, turned to the songs of taverns, the next one bawdier than the last, with Harriet periodically chiming in. Thomas knew none of the words, but they amused and only intermittently appalled him. Dunheath spun Millicent around, her face flushed as she labored to sing and keep pace with him. Despite repeated calls to put down the potatoes, Thomas peeled away mostly undeterred and pointedly resisted their pleas to join them. Harriet, sitting next to him on the bench, slid in closer. She purposefully looked at him and smiled. Something curled in Thomas’s stomach, and he twisted his head away from her. His eyes inadvertently fell upon Millicent and Dunheath just as he pressed a kiss to her mouth, his heavy hand creeping up her side towards her neckline.

Thomas abruptly stood, dropping the potato he was holding. The couple stopped and stared him down. Harriet shuffled off back to the kitchen, her eyes to the ground, flustered and embarrassed.

“Oh, aye, what is it now?” Dunheath asked.

“I’m feeling a bit out of sorts.”

“Don’t have a head for drink then?”

“No, I guess not,” Thomas replied, smiling weakly.

Dunheath approached him and put out his hand. Thomas placed the small knife in it.

As he walked back up the stairs, he tripped over their kiss. As he entered his cell, he stubbed his toe on their embrace. He lay on his bed, unblinking. He struggled to dislodge the image from his mind, but the dark of the cell, like the dark of his closed eyes, only provided a clean canvas for it. Dunheath’s moistened lips bearing down on Millicent’s, his large rough hand rising higher and higher until his thumb found the swell at the top of her breast. Thomas could clearly see the thin crescent of filth beneath his nail, and the shadow the finger’s impression cast on the soft flesh. He could feel that thumb on his own flesh. It felt like the thumb Oswyn slipped into his mouth that one afternoon. The thumb that left behind the taste of soil then slid wet across the bow of his lower lip and down his throat.

The memory blanketed him in the warmth and light of the hothouse. He only lasted a minute, but for a minute he was there. As he rubbed his seed between his fingers, he laughed with surprise and relief that he had not been completely broken.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

“Where are the things I asked for?” Thomas snapped, having no energy to expend on courtesy.

He opened the tin box Peter brought. Displeased by its contents, he let the lid drop.

“I already have to give them all a guinea each just to have the room.”

Thomas snorted and inspected the bottle of port, the one thing, the least important thing, Peter delivered on.

“And what are another few guineas to you, Peter?”

“What you are asking for costs more than a few guineas, and you know that. I do not have the kind of wealth your family does.”

“My family?” Thomas ran a hand over his face, over his contemptuous grin. “All who are my family are on the other side of the ocean.”

“Thomas, I have never known you to be prone to self-pity like this. Consider yourself blessed you live in a civilized nation and not some godless place where they would simply castrate you like a bull. They feed you, clothe you, keep you safe.”

“Because I am so degraded, you think I cannot be insulted?”

“I did not mean to — “

Thomas laughed, exhausted by absolutely everything, and patted Peter’s knee.

“I know you do not mean to. Thank you, Peter, as always for your constancy and your patience.”

Peter nodded then leaned in closer to Thomas. He swallowed audibly.

“Thomas, I…I wish I was here for a reason other than the one I have come here for. Dear god, how shall I put this? I received word about Miranda and the lieutenant some time ago.”

The sudden softening of his tone told much to Thomas already.

“No.” He shook his head. “No.”

“Their ship was set upon by pirates. No passengers were spared. I would have informed you when their…when the information was confirmed, but Mr. Tyson advised me to wait until your, er, melancholy had improved.”

“Lord, that word. Will no one be satisfied until I repeat it meaninglessly and rend my garments in a fever?”

“I understand this is more than you can bear to hear.”

Thomas dropped his head into his hands and dug his fingers into his scalp.

“All you can do now is seek forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness? From — ”

Thomas was about to gesture to the painting of Christ and doubting him, except he was in the wrong office, and behind this desk was the Annunciation.

“Do not forget that it was your actions that led you all here, to this end.”

“My what? I was doing what was tasked to me by my father.”

“You know of what I speak.”

Thomas narrowed his eyes at him then looked away. “Who are you? I do not know you.”

Peter sighed impatiently.

“I think I ought to leave before your grief has you do or say something you may regret later. It might be best that you take some time with this distressing news before we meet again. I will get someone to attend to you.”

Thomas grabbed him by the arm and wrenched him back towards the chair. Peter, stunned by this coercion, fell into it.

“They will confiscate this so you will remain here, in that chair, until I am done with it.”

He locked the bottle between his knees and tore the cork out with his teeth.

“Thomas, I must return for a vo — ”

“Allow me this, my friend. I have only just learned that the people dearest to me…the people dearest to me — “

“All right!” Peter inhaled deeply. “All right. I will stay but not for much longer.”

Thomas brought the bottle to his lips and threw his head back, his other hand still firm on Peter’s arm.

“Is that wise?”

He glared at Peter with scolding disbelief as he wiped the wine from his chin. 

“ _Non compos mentis_ and all that. The grief, Peter. See how it disturbs my humors?”

When the last drop was had, Thomas released Peter’s arm and the empty bottle onto the carpet. He was uncomfortably full and pictured himself a bloated wineskin with limbs and a face. He rose slowly. As did his brain. When it broke though the surface, it bobbed in the thick warmth of the wine.

“Thomas?”

“Oh, that look on your face. Your face sometimes, Peter. You know that you and I have had more than a few bottles on many occasions.”

“That is not what I — “

“You must tend to urgent lordly business, yes? I do not want to be the reason for yet another person’s misfortune.” 

Thomas beckoned to follow him out into the entrance hall.

“Let these people help you so that they may convince your father you can be more…accommodating.”

“But, Peter, how they can help me, when there is naught that needs helping?”

“Stop that, Thomas. You are not above recrimination. Consider it. That is all I am asking.”

Thomas offered only a slight shake of the head as a response.

As he watched Peter walk away with aggravation stiff in his back, regret over his behavior began to weigh heavily on him. He turned away from the doors, hugging the tin box harder. He wished it was a second bottle of port instead since one would be no purgative for him. He needed at least another to help rid himself of this cratering sorrow for the night.

He scoured the entrance hall. There were kind people even here, there were always kind people he found, but none here who could do what only James and Miranda could. If he truly was afflicted, there now was no cure for him.

He walked over to the central staircase and glared at the guards standing on the third step, loathing them utterly.

“Let me up the stairs!”

So used to the ravings of the patients, ignoring him required no effort. Thomas planted his feet on the first step. One of the guards inched to the side and acknowledged him with barely a glance. He took another step, and he was suddenly on the floor. He wrapped himself around the box as if protecting it gave this abuse purpose. When they were sufficiently satisfied by his lack of movement, they resumed their position on the steps. Thomas gritted his teeth, fighting the reflex to cry. He sucked in a few shallow breaths before forcing himself back onto his feet, the box still in his arms.

The steward, a witness to this, approached Thomas. He looked up at him but saw no one.

“Take him to Mr. Adams. For something to calm him.”

Another guard grabbed Thomas by the arm and led him back to the offices. With a shove towards the apothecary’s door, pain sheared him in two. The box slipped from his grasp and hit the floor, its sugary contents spilling out and scattering in a wide radius. Just as the guard herded him into the room, there was a shout outside of the door. The shout turned into a cacophony of shouts as a mob began scrabbling for the fallen comfits and wresting them from each other’s hands. The guard ran out to quell the patients, adding his own bellowing voice to the clamor. Thomas shut the door behind him, but he needed a key to lock it. Only then did he notice the maid standing next to it, backed up against the wall in terror.

“Oh. Good day. Are you going to be assisting Mr. Adams?”

She nodded, her eyes as wide and as round as the cupping glasses in the surgery.

“My name is Thomas. I’m afraid I have been hurt quite badly so you ought to know that I may do or say improper things. Ah. That sounded rather threatening. That was not meant to sound at all threatening. Do you believe me?”

She nodded again as she gathered her apron in her fists. Her eyes darted from him to the commotion outside as if she debated taking her chances in the hall than remain with him. 

Thomas eased himself into Adams’s chair with a grunt and started opening the drawers. The ones that were unlocked contained only a Bible, a ledger, some loose documents, and a few halfpennies he offered to the maid. But no keys.

“You must have a name if I have one.”

“It’s Anne, sir.”

“Miss Anne. Anne of Bohemia. Anne of Denmark. Anne of our great sovereign state. And how can I forget — the grandmother of Christ!”

The girl gasped. “The Lord didn’t have a grandmother!”

It was not a point he was particularly interested in debating, but he was encouraged by her responsiveness. He sat back in the chair and clasped his side. Anne winced at his whimpers, her expression fluctuating between fear and concern.

From behind the desk, Thomas noticed next to the glass-fronted cabinet of tinctures and tisanes, an unassuming cellarette with a vase of dead flowers on it. He kept a similar one in his study that contained a small reserve of alcohol for those days James could not join him at the house. Thomas was pleased to see this one did too. Inside were not the brown and green bottles of the crudely distilled spirits Adams used in his medicinal elixirs but fine crystal decanters. Thomas pulled the stopper out of one and sniffed it. Whisky. He was about to bring it to his lips when he remembered Anne.

“How very rude of me. Would you care for some? There are glasses.”

She shook her head and flattened herself more against the wall.

“You shouldn’t. That belongs to Mr. Adams.”

“Drinks while on duty, does he? Than I shall too.”

Even with the wine still flowing throughout him like mud, he greedily guzzled the whisky. His throat burned and his eyes watered, but he kept drinking. When his esophagus contracted in protest, he finally pulled his mouth off. He stared, swaying, at the half-empty decanter in his hand.

It was such a puerile impulse, the kind of dare Keswick would have whispered in his ear when they were at Eton. Perhaps he was still whispering to him. Although this place often felt forsaken, Thomas never did stop praying and prayed even now. For mercy and for strength. And if God did talk to him, he wasn’t too surprised that he sounded an awful lot like Keswick.

“What are you doing, sir?” Anne squeaked.

“Miss Anne, I strongly advise you to face the wall you have been attempting to merge with. Now. Please.”

She sheepishly did as he ordered and shut her eyes for good measure. Thomas also turned his back to her and hastily pulled his cock out of his trousers. He pressed the head to the decanter’s opening and expressed just enough to replace what he drank. He dropped the stopper back in and returned it to the cellarette before the melee outside was completely subdued.

He sat down in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. He collected himself as best as he could albeit with a brain that no longer floated but floundered in alcohol. A guard followed by Adams entered the room. Or was it Talman or Tyson? In Thomas’s drunken state, the identity of whoever was about to counsel him mattered little since they all spoke the same rot and rubbish.

Adams settled down behind the desk. God, held aloft by the disembodied heads of seraphim, gazed down at Thomas from behind him. He opened the ledger and lowered his face a few inches from it, his thick spectacles in apparent need of additional thickening.

“It has been a year, six months, and twenty-two days since you were admitted. It says here that your initial progress was halting, but the officers had agreed the indications for recovery were present.” Adams sighed wearily and closed the book. “This might have been true at the time, but your recent conniptions have doubtlessly reversed any progress. This one today being the most damaging. We have to consider now the possibility that your troubles are innate.”

“So now I am a born fool instead of merely a fool.”

“If that proves to be true, all we can do is keep you in a more compliant state so that you cannot harm yourself or others.”

Thomas looked up at the painting. “Why do you not strike this ignoramus down?”

_Is that, dear cabbage, what you truly want?_

Adams leaned forward and squinted at Thomas.

“Good heavens, Mr. Hamilton! Are you drunk?”

Thomas tightened his grip around the arms of the chair. It might have been the way Adams’s beady eyes got a little beadier just then, or how his spectacles slid down the oily slope of his nose, or the extraordinarily long hair that curled out of his left eyebrow and touched the lowest furrow in his forehead. Whichever it was, it compelled Thomas to jump to his feet and slam his hands on the desk. Anne screamed and ran out of the room.

“That is not my name! That is not — ! Goddamnit, you fatuous, bloviating idiot!”

His lungs pounded on his cracked ribs. Pain lanced him through and through, over and over. Bone ground against bone, and he was on the floor again. Feet closed in around him.

_Get up._

Thomas didn’t.

After one fit too many, Tyson deemed him “incurable.”

He was remanded to upper floor, where the wards housed fewer patients, including Fulney. It was clear that this was where the genuinely infirm and imbecilic resided, where their shit could not be smelled or their ceaseless screaming heard by the visitors, and where he was now counted among them.

Seated on the bed, he pressed his feet flat against the opposite wall. The size of his new cell seemed to reflect how much less of him there was.

He pushed the wet hair out of his eyes and dried his face with his sleeve. His father often told him, any relevance aside, how much better a man he would have been if he had been alive during the plague. Then one dead body would not have meant a damn after seeing stacked corpses carted down the road. While Keswick’s corpse was not Thomas’s first, his living body was. After seeing it without color and so waxen, then discovering with a surreptitious poke how shockingly cold it was too, Thomas couldn’t reconcile this to the friend he adored, who was always so flush with strange desires. If this was the state in which he was to enter Heaven, Thomas knew if Keswick could have, he would have railed with such furor that no one had thought to at least rouge his cheeks.

It was in his twenty-sixth year that he was found in an alley near the Royal Exchange. A robbery, they said. That fool would never see for reason or sense, they always said. This Thomas was certain of, only because what they considered reason and sense Keswick simply never saw as such. His poor wife, his poor child! they lamented. To all of them, the unseemly circumstances of his death were apt. Most apt. Miranda had pulled Thomas from the room, explaining to others that she needed air.

Thomas set her beside Keswick, not too far from his mother. He promised to fill her tomb with music and art, wherever he could find them here. He apologized that the offerings would be scant and most likely not be of the quality she was accustomed to, but he knew her love would find the beauty in all of them. James’s was placed in the center of the crossing, where it could be seen from all points. His was to remain empty so that Thomas might crawl into it.

  

  

  

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember the bottle of piss story from season 1? For some reason that got into my head the idea of Thomas pissing into someone's bottle of booze as a prank. And there you have it. This fic's origin story.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> super rambly filler chapter alert

All it took James was a tilt of the head and a solemn nod to lure Thomas into a more vulnerable position. At school he had strenuously learned to avoid this situation; and at Whitehall, he was more than capable of stymieing attempts by others to maneuver him into it. But there he was, flat on his back, belly exposed. After the surprise of it wore off, and he relitigated the execution of Captain Green, he was met with a smile deadlier than an asp’s bite. 

Accordingly, Thomas dedicated himself to the study of James’s physiognomy. He identified and catalogued a number of expressions and tics, James having no shortage of them, but none so crucial a finding as the barely perceptible quirk of his mouth that preceded his ripostes. At the sight of it, Thomas would stop mid-word, ask for the lieutenant’s opinion, then sit back for the methodical flaying his own would receive.

He had seen similar performances given by others, but by the end of them, he was rarely richer in ideas or inspiration. He was not a cynic by nature, but circumstances usually required him to be one. In pushing James, he assumed that if he cracked that lovely but cocky exterior, he would reveal yet another pretender. But then he found himself pushing for the purpose of being pushed back, of being thrown off his footing to feel the momentary thrill of falling while also knowing he’d be caught. James reminded him that vulnerability did not have to be a weakness when treated with respect and care. If his father knew he subscribed to this concept, his journey to the grave would surely be expedited.

While James’s understanding of how to operate in a world of pretenders and cynics was assured, outside of it, his confidence was less so. Fortunately for Thomas, he had reached a level of comfort with him to admit this. On occasion, from the other side of the pillow, James sometimes scrutinized him as if he was a sailing knot he didn’t recognize, Thomas liking to think he viewed even him through a nautical prism. He privately basked in those moments or with Miranda but also urged James to, yes, please, master his unraveling.

Thomas slid down the headboard with his feet planted on James’s chest. He teasingly circled his nipples with his toes. Pulling away from his touch, James sat back on his heels to appreciate the body so shamelessly splayed before him. His eyes rambled up the field of skin and muscle until they reached Thomas’s face. The most self-satisfied grin spread crookedly across it. 

He could almost see James’s mind behind those eyes, turning as it weighed which tactic to take to next. He reached up and held onto the headboard to brace himself. He affixed his eyes to that mouth. A pregnant pause stilled the room.

There it was, his tell, subtle and fleeting, but before Thomas could mount a defense, James grabbed his ankle and chased a flying trill over the sole of his foot with his fingertips.

“You —!” Thomas jerked his foot away. “This is serious, James. Most serious.”

“Is that so?”

“Very much so. Consider it an essential part of your education.”

“ _My_ education? In which discipline, pray tell?”

“In the discipline of —”

“Fucking?” 

The word sent a gratuitous frisson up Thomas’s spine. 

_If a voice could fuck…_

“To put it so demurely, yes.”

“Then I will need your steadfast guidance.”

“Begin with what you know.”

Thomas settled back into position. James unstopped the bottle he had left in the dip of Thomas’s sternum and poured the oil into his palm. He formed a sluice with his hand and let it drip onto Thomas’s perineum. The gentle patter of the drops made him clench and his toes curl into the hair on James’s chest. He traced the line down the center of Thomas’s scrotum to his entrance, his finger warm and slick on the tender skin. He rubbed his hole in languid circles, tugging it open as he did, before inserting his finger in to the knuckle. Ever ready, James had filed his nails down beforehand.

Thomas raised his arms and crossed them over his head. His chest rose sharply and fell heavily as James eased in and out of him until the muscle stopped pushing.

“I’m going to…”

James inserted another finger, stretching and filling him, pushing out a high dreamy sigh through his slack lips. He slowly withdrew them, and, knowing that Thomas preferred penetration on the more indelicate side, reentered with less circumspection.

“Ah! Ah… Can you feel it?” Thomas asked.

“I believe so.”

“Maybe a little… Yes.” Thomas gasped then laughed, his cheeks coloring. He covered James’s hand with his and pressed it flat against his body to savor the heat of contact. “Why don’t you try spelling my name?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“My name. In majuscules.”

“Thomas, you really are…”

“Let’s — _ahhh_.”

James’s fingers wriggled inside him presumably to form a ’T.’ Warmth flooded his lower body. James shifted his fingers again. A spasm jolted Thomas’s knees further apart. His cock felt so heavy and stiff to nearly numb, but his cock was hardly relevant. A vaguely circular motion ignited his nerves with the drag of curved fingers. He bit down on his lip, trapping a groan between his teeth and flesh. His body strained towards the pressure that built more and more, and climbed higher and higher inside of him with every incremental movement. 

“Ah!” Thomas’s shoulders sprang clean off the bed. His hands flew out to grab James’s knees for anchor. “Which was that?”

“A.”

“You’ve stopped. Why have you stopped?” Thomas asked breathlessly. He reached down for James’s wrist.

“By not knowing the actual cause of this, I believe we are overlooking a fundamental part of this lesson.”

“Are you serious? Oh, god. There’s this Royal Society Fellow. Something Cowper. He would know. I can introduce you to him when your fingers are not up my arse. Please, James. _A_.” 

James tilted his head…

“ _Please_.”

…then nodded.

Thomas propped himself up on his elbows for better leverage to move himself on the torturously stationary fingers. He huffed in frustration as he struggled to remove the bolster from beneath his lower back. James placed his hand on his chest, halting his exertions, and lightly pushed. Thomas sighed at his patient but forceful touch and lay back down. James drew himself over him so that his face hovered a hairsbreadth from his. His gaze was steady and dark but reassuring. It seemed to command Thomas to touch him, to run his thumbs along the brackets around his mouth and lick the plump arch of his upper lip. His hands rose, pulled in by his gravity, but he only grazed his temples, too dumb to do more.

“A,” James repeated into Thomas’s open mouth, shattering him upon the solitary letter.

He drove his fingers in deeper, petting and palpating him from the inside. Having determined the optimal technique, he abandoned the spelling of his name. Thomas’s pleasure was already branded with one, and it certainly was not his own. He rocked back and forth as James increased the speed at which he fucked him, each upward thrust punching a gasp out his lungs and stealing his next breath. He loved that he could be made to buck so wildly, be taken apart and wrecked like this with just the brisk motions of two fingers.

“Oh, James!”

A moan rolled up from deep within his gut and rattled his body on its way out. His cock dribbled pathetically against his stomach, but his body still ached for release, the pressure within him unabated. James liberally coated his fingers with more oil before resuming his assault. Thomas contracted with each stuttering intake of air, but James staunchly kept him open, sliding his finger over the other before inserting a third one, the pain of it a twin to his pleasure.

“Oh, god!”

James clamped a hand down on his mouth, stifling his cries and driving his head back deep into the pillow. His body seemed to reach the limits of its ability to contain this, this which threatened to snap his bones and tear his muscles, and could do no more but surrender. He arched off the bed, every taut fiber of his being begging for relief, before he finally crashed back down, his body folding and unfolding like a landed fish.

His breath returned first, and then his heartbeat. Sight and sound lagged behind. His lips a moue slurred my, my, mine between glottal gulps. 

As he gradually recovered his senses, he heard James shout from handling his own need. He felt the pang of disappointment over being deprived of the opportunity to pleasure him in the same manner.

“I could not wait. You were so… I thought I would release just from watching you.”

“I must have appeared…”

“Ravishing.”

Thomas chuckled. “For a man with no formal education, you do excel at letters.”

He rolled his eyes à la Miranda. Thomas smiled at the thought that he had two wives now.

James got up to retrieve a flannel from the washstand. Thomas looked down at himself and was taken aback by how much fluid he emitted. He had truly been wrung dry. He gathered what James left on his hip and dragged it with a snaking finger through his own seed. As the milkiness ran clear, it began to spill down the sides of his torso in watery rivulets. James tried to catch them all before they reached the bedding, but it was a futile effort, one which Thomas observed with fondness.

He pushed off the bed to sit up, but his joints wouldn’t click into place, and he fell against James with a surprised noise. James’s arms came around his shoulders to hold him in place, his body Thomas’s buttress. He nosed Thomas’s cheek and planted soft kisses along his jaw, swathing him in a sleepy haze of comfort. Thomas took James’s flaccid cock in his hand and gently tugged at the foreskin, drawing out a bead from its folds. He twitched with a muffled grunt. Thomas laughed, utterly delighted by the sound.

“When you’re ready, I will show you how ‘James’ feels.”

He pulled away to look Thomas in the eye. He wore that smirk of his, the one that Thomas had to resist biting.

“But ’A’ is only the second letter. How ever shall I get through the others?” he asked with mock helplessness.

“Well! Imagine if you had been christened an Adam or an Ajax.”

“Stop.”

“Or an Aeneas or an Assaracus.”

“Stop.”

“Or an Absalom or an Agamemnon.”

“ _Stop_.” 

James pushed his face into Thomas’s and smothered him with a kiss.

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

It was shortly after sunrise. The creases of red and orange dissolved into the soft opaque gray of early morning. As usual, it was misting, the air cool and carrying the soot and smell of chimney smoke. Thomas heard the distant clip of hooves on cobblestone and the flap of pigeon wings like rustling parchment.

Standing barefoot on his bed, Thomas could just see out of his window the spire of Grocers’ Hall. He imagined Peter, wig askew, a trail of loose papers in his wake, scuttling down its corridors to aid in the business of funding the Queen’s war. He wondered how he was doing, if the frequency of his spells had decreased at all.

About two miles east from Grocers’ Hall was the execution dock where he and James watched a man die. A little further east was James’s bedsit where Thomas was lord and supplicant. About three miles west from where he stood on his toes was his house. _His home_.

To everyone who entered the ward, Fulney asked if they were taking him to his home. Aware enough that Bethlem was not it but unaware that he would never leave it, there was always a hopeful lilt to his questioning voice. Thomas liked to imagine he was asking for all of them, and a small part of him did pray that one day he would receive the answer they wanted to hear.

He had initially found that house punishingly small and dark. The size of the gardens and the lack of a proper paddock for the horses pained him. He fretted that all of his favorite books would not fit in the study, and the idea of having to walk to the library should one of them have to be settled there irritated him beyond reason. The clocks chattered incessantly, and his attempts to engage the new servants were met with terse, rehearsed replies. He wrote Miranda almost daily, yearning for her arrival.

The day before their wedding Thomas sought out in a frenzy the most expensive and most ridiculous-looking harpsichord he could find. After it was delivered, he immediately dispatched the coachman to fetch Miranda from her aunt’s house. He rushed her into the drawing room without even a greeting. When he uncovered her eyes, she clapped and shrieked with laughter. With her coat still on her shoulders and her hands still in her gloves, she sat down to play, bringing life to the house that children never would.

Unlike Miranda, Thomas had no proficiency at music. He couldn’t hum “Greensleeves” without being asked if he had taken ill. This defect particularly bedeviled him after he had to accept that he couldn’t draw or paint either. That part of his brain was proven again to be hopelessly ineffectual by Miranda’s patient attempts at instruction. Sitting beside her with his hands sometimes fluttering wishfully on his knees, he learned to simply love the sight her fingers skating across the keys. In turn, he offered what he had, the musicality of words, even though they could not accomplish what music could so efficiently and universally. With little effort, it invaded and plundered the heart, brought joyous tears to one’s eyes, or urged one’s feet to move. As Miranda herself did too.

Side-by-side in the house that was now their home, they supervised the footmen as they removed paintings from the walls of the great room and rearranged them. Between the Van Dyck and the Giordano, a space was cleared for their newest acquisition.

“Apparently I have married the wrong man.”

The din of the ward grew as its residents stirred to life. He shut his eyes and focused on her voice until it was bright and clear.

Thomas wrapped an arm around Miranda’s waist and kissed her temple. “But the right wrong man.”

“We ought to say something.”

Thomas cocked his head and sighed.

“I prefer that we didn’t. If only to spare myself the accusations of vanity. It is remarkable though how unable he was to achieve any likeness. But you are clearly you, so perhaps this is not commentary on his skills but on my face. Tell me, is my face such a difficult one?”

They fell into silence as they pondered the pallid figure before them.

“The craftsmanship of the frame is quite fine,” Thomas murmured into the side of his finger.

“Hm, yes. Yes, it is,” Miranda murmured into the side of her finger.

The artist had left them alone to admire their completed wedding portrait. The man’s face it depicted belonged to no one but was Thomas’s, and it was clearer to him than the one he had now. While it lacked beauty or polish, or any quality that made art great, they were able to find humor in its imperfection, and its imperfection was what made it so memorable.

“Darling, it appears an intruder has painted his visage over mine.”

“God’s hooks! Is that Catalina de Erauso with my dearest wife? I am scandalized!”

“Woe be to him who has dared to hang his image in my house. He shall meet his death by my hands!”

Thomas pounded the dining table once with his fist. The blancmange jumped from Miranda’s spoon.

Over time the dreadful painting became one of their most cherished possessions. They looked upon it with affection as they did each other when they were married and all the years that followed.

The day’s first rap of a cudgel against a door. Thomas jumped, returning to the present. It was not his door, but he promptly stepped down from his bed and put his shoes on.

As he waited, he began to shift the paintings around the great room again. It was one of the more stimulating activities he engaged in. He figured if he moved the small Novelli to the space on the eastern wall behind the Veyrier statue of dying Achilles, there should be enough room for a sizable painting of James. He compiled a list of portraitists he thought would be worthy of such a commission and lamented that Mignard and Beale could not be added to it. He contemplated whether or not James should wear the hat, and if the addition of a spyglass was too cliché. Miranda always had the better eye for details such as those anyway.

He considered that James might be better served by sculpture, the art form for gods, but could even a resurrected Bernini adequately capture what he had known and not just seen of that body? And that impossible face, which was so sharp and soft, and dark and light all at once? What stone could even evoke freckles?

The damp, flat smack of a cudgel connecting with bared flesh.

It struck Thomas that limestone with its porous quality just might.

By evening, the mist had turned into rain. It cascaded down the wall beneath the window and saturated his bed. Chips of plaster like bits of shell accumulated in a puddle by his feet. He ran his fingers along the sill, and they came away wet and white. He drove the heel of his hand into it, and a small section crumbled.

He peered over his shoulder. The ward was not lit, and the moon was shrouded. He could not be seen. He picked at the softened plaster around the bars and pushed the debris out of the window. He was determined to gain another inch of light, another inch of air.

“You, you! Have you come to take me home?”

The guard leaned against the doorjamb as he assessed the state of his cell. Thomas bade him good morning, taking any opportunity to speak, and tucked his raw, red hands between his thighs. When the guard gestured to his neck with a wag of his finger, Thomas’s shoulders sagged with defeat.

“Are you taking me home? Home, home, home?”

A servant entered his cell to patch the wall and window. He was new to Bethlem, arrived from Canterbury with a younger sister. This much Thomas was able to coax out of him as he slathered fresh plaster around the bars. His slapdash work left the window even smaller than it was before. The man assured him that this would keep the rain out. Thomas was skeptical but thanked him.

“Have you, you, you come to take me home?”

Thomas heard the familiar shuffle of a basket being dragged across the floor. He even recognized the off-kilter gait of the person for whom the size and weight of it were a little too much. When Harriet came into view through the bars, he thought he would cry.

“I still do not bite.”

She turned her head away from him.

“You should worry about her biting you,” the guard who accompanied her cracked.

“Oh, shut your potato trap, Benson.”

He banged the cudgel against Thomas’s door, triggering a wave of hoots and hollers. “You got a mouth.”

Undaunted, Harriet flapped her arms at him. “Out, out, you arse worm! There’s no room in here for the three of us.”

Benson tucked his cudgel back into his belt and begrudgingly stepped out. Harriet brushed past Thomas to reach for his sodden pallet. He lifted the other end.

“Don’t!” she hissed under her breath.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice small and begging. She finally met his eyes and saw him. “Please, Harriet.”

She glanced over her shoulder to the guard. “All right?”

He stopped digging into his ear with his finger and shrugged.

“Come on, Thomas.”

As he helped her stuff a clean tick with straw, questions passed silently between them. They took their time. When the task was completed, he sat on the dry bed and smiled, wishing he could say all that was on his mind but was too tired to say anything at all. She returned his smile before leaving his cell, clumsily dragging his wet pallet behind her.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

“Look sharp, Miss. You have a gentleman visitor.”

Benson ran his cudgel along the bars of Thomas’s cell in a one-note glissando before opening the door. Peter hesitantly stepped sideways into view. He bore no gifts.

“You! Are you here to take me home?”

Peter pivoted towards the voice in alarm.

“I was not aware they allowed visitors up here. Please, sit.” Thomas patted his bed.

Peter looked towards Benson for direction.

“Do what you like,” he muttered indifferently.

Peter chose to stand just outside of the cell.

“I was informed by Mr. Tyson that you had not been agreeably comporting yourself.” So distracted by the new sounds of the ward, he could barely get his words out.

“Well. It’s not Little Ease. Although the neighbors are a touch more…touched. The guards up here worry excessively if any approach may lead to the loss of a finger.”

“Are you saying you…”

“Mr. Benson there would prefer that we be kept in chains at all times.”

“Did you…bite someone?” The question obviously did not come naturally to Peter.

“I did convince Mr. Tyson that it made more economical sense to discontinue administering laudanum to an incurable such as myself. As you well know, sometimes it is more effective to argue with a purse than a person.”

“From where I stand, it does not look like an arrangement that favors you. I was hopi—”

Peter twisted around to see the source of the ceaseless grunting behind him. The young man in the cell across from Thomas’s had his back against the bars. His arm sawed back and forth, his hand down the front of his trousers.

“Jesus, is he —“

“Spit, Geoffrey. Do spit in your hand,” Thomas implored. He looked at Peter, pretending he shared in his exasperation, and gravely shook his head. “He does that until he gets sores, and then he must be restrained until he heals. Ghastly. When a problem has a simple and elegant solution that goes unheeded.”

Peter placed his hand over his mouth and swallowed hard.

“See how alike we are? We who let our passions supersede good sense. I confess though. I have only christened him Geoffrey for my convenience. We have yet to get around to introductions. But never mind all that. Are you well? How is little Abigail?”

“Big. She has gotten…big. Are you to remain up here?”

“Due to the elevated status of my illness, I am no longer eligible to receive counsel or in any position to demand information. Such as what it is that has kept you away for so long.”

“Yes, I do apologize for my absence. A new venture has kept me rather occupied. Related to which… This is… Thomas, this is unfortunately the last time I will be coming here.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I’m leaving England.”

“What has he done? What has my father done?”

“It is not what you think.”

“Right, yes, a new venture, you said. A new venture. Where is this new venture taking you?”

Peter shifted his feet. “The Carolina colony. I’ve been appointed Governor.”

His words sparked in Thomas’s brain.

“I suppose…congratulations are in order. I have to say though that does not sound especially retaliatory on my father’s part. Not at all. Quite the opposite in fact. What I am not grasping is why my father would have allowed that? Why would he have allowed the other Lords Proprietor to allow that? You are clever, yes, but an ally of mine is an enemy of my father’s, and I cannot imagine he could see you as anything else. How ever did you convince him? He is not a man easily swayed or at all. You must tell me.”

“It’s not impossible.”

The words caught fire.

“But not for nothing. He could not be swayed unless he benefitted in equal measure or more. What did you give him, Peter?”

“Thomas —“

“Why, it must have been tremendous. To gain your own sovereignty in the new world?”

“Thomas —“

“Enormous…immense… Monstrous in fact!”

“ _Thomas!_ ” 

Peter’s shout reverberated off the walls, and for a brief moment the entire ward was silent. Thomas could hear the crisp burning of the candle wicks.

“You understand only your father can authorize your release.”

“And you have helped him to keep it that way.”

“Maybe you should think on what you can offer him. I’m sure if he could be persuaded of your penitence —“

“If I should ever bend to him the way you have, I hope it is to have my head cut off.”

Peter shook his head, his mouth a hard line. “You would pardon pirates but scorn a man for trying to improve his standing when the opportunity to do so presents itself. You were the one who argued the more flawed a man was, the more compassion should he be shown. I have shown you compassion, haven’t I? Where is mine then?”

Thomas laughed out of disbelief. “That is not how compassion works.” 

“Your flaws, Thomas. They are far more profound than mine. See the toll they have exacted from yourself, from Miranda and the Lieutenant.”

“I do not need the false compassion of cowards, and nor would they if they were alive!”

Peter started at the bang of a cudgel against a wall.

“Oi there, Tom.”

“‘Tom.’ Poor Tom indeed. Pray that God forgives you. If not for what you’ve done, then for your hubris.”

Thomas raised a hand, stopping Peter from leaving. He straightened his back as he watched Thomas work his fingers deep into his mouth.

“Ah!” he cheered. He raised a molar between his spittle-covered fingertips. “This has been quite the bother the past few weeks. All those vomits. They are not kind to the teeth.”

Thomas tossed it in Peter’s direction, but his aim was poor.

“Christ.” Peter looked away.

“Why are you even here? You needn’t tell me any of this.”

“Whatever you think or feel now, I do care for you. As I did Miranda. All things considered, I have done my best to help all of you.”

Thomas jerked his head back as if he had been stung. “‘All things considered’? Shall you put that on my headstone?”

“You of all people should understand why one goes to the lengths one does to achieve his goal, whatever the consequences may be. In due time, I know you will see my actions for reason —“

“Why…do you…do you seek a pardon?”

“You’re being ridiculous now.”

Thomas cleared his throat.

“I, Poor Tom Hamilton, do promise and declare on the twelfth day of March, in the year of our Lord one-thousand seven-hundred and…eight? Should Lord Peter Ashe, the second Baron Ashe, surrender to me, Poor Tom Hamilton, that he shall be hereby granted my gracious pardon for the diverse crimes of being a shit. And an absolute shit. And a shit extraordinaire. And a shit without peer.”

“I do not need to hear the exact words, because I know you well enough to know that you have already forgiven me.”

_Fucker!_

“Then no more needs to be said.” Thomas turned away from the door. “Good-bye, Peter-Peter.”

“Good-bye, Thomas.”

He pressed his fists to his eyes and listened to Peter’s footsteps and Fulney’s earnest questioning. The slam of a door, and he was gone. The guards blew out the candles as they approached Geoffrey’s cell. The key entered the lock, and he began to howl a high, mournful adagio.

Thomas toed off his shoes and climbed up onto his bed. The chain wasn’t long enough for him to reach the window, but leaning against the wall and angled a bit to the left, he could see the moon in the upper right corner. It was full. Fearing the mania it could induce, the shackle around his neck wouldn’t be removed until daylight.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fuuuuck writing is hard. y'all do this for fun? each word is like death. *watches soul leave body for the umpteenth time*


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a lot of words about Thomas on a ship

St. Paul’s still had no clock, but its bells, ringing for the second Lord’s Prayer of the day, informed Thomas that he was late. He had started attending service there for its proximity to James’s home while Miranda continued on at Westminster with her aunt. To no one’s surprise, his father criticized the change of venue, denouncing Thomas's predilection for novelty and the cathedral’s architecture as insufficiently Protestant. James also would not join him there, preferring another St. Paul's with its many graves of sea captains. 

He was not a particularly pious man, but James understood the necessity of appearing as one. When Thomas insisted on accompanying him to his parish church, he demurred, claiming he would be no closer to him in spirit if he did. With an innocent smile, Thomas reminded him of how he usually regarded refusals as precursors to assent. 

Dressed in his ink-purple velvet suit and seated in the pew that creaked the most and the loudest, a few too many eyes were on him instead of the pulpit. To his utter amazement, he had somehow forgotten his Bible. In order to share James’s, Thomas sidled up to him and pressed his body, shoulder to foot, against his. He politely dismissed James’s repeated suggestion to take the book, not wanting to further impose upon him. At the end of service, he emptied his purse into the vicar's hand and was enthusiastically invited back, but James wondered out loud if he might commune better with God back in the City than in Shadwell. 

"Frankly you may be less distracted. And less distracting,“ James said, the high color of cheeks finally cooling. 

Thomas stopped fondling James's Bible.

“I suppose since God sees all, demonstrations of devotion needn’t be confined to officially designated houses of worship," he replied with a wink.

It was never too long after James returned to his bedsit that Thomas, short of breath from running up the three flights of stairs, arrived and was upon him. 

He kicked the door shut behind him then lowered himself onto his knees to run his fanned fingers up and down James’s thighs. He slid them around and up to cup his backside and kneaded the firm flesh. A prayer still in his hands and a hymn in his mouth, this was his altar.

“I’m sure this is not the effect the Church of England intended to have on men.”

“This is the precise effect it should have on men. All that talk of being rewarded in humility beneath the stern hand of God. How one must make himself dust and cinders in order for Him to…” Thomas waved a hand through the air as he searched for a word. “ _Increase_.”

“And so you will continue to insist on kneeling in spite of your advanced age?”

“My adva—“ Thomas stopped himself with a shake of the head and resumed scrambling more verses beyond recognizability. “God casts the wicked to the ground, and I have been brought low by my sins and the perverseness of my tongue. In seeking redemption, I must humble myself before Him so that He may open my lips, and my mouth can sing His praises."

James tipped Thomas’s hat off. “There really is no need for these contrivances.”

“We’ve discussed this.”

“Yes, we did, but for the sake of your knees perhaps we should go about this more efficiently.”

James pried himself away to fetch a bolster. 

“When the bards wrote of love, they of course celebrated its extraordinary efficiency,” Thomas said over his shoulder.

What had given rise to this bit of farce was a matter of what Thomas considered practicality. The bed was too small for him to comfortably suck James’s cock while looking him in the eye. The attempted contortions were not conducive to taking more than an inch or two without readily exhausting his jaw or losing feeling in a limb. While James did communicate much to him without the need for eye contact, Thomas also craved the look of pleasure on his face, and they have found this position to be the most _efficient_ in providing him with this.

James placed the bolster on the floor. Still bent at the waist, he brushed his lips against Thomas’s. A soft thing to smooth the edges of his lust.

“Maybe leave the wig on,” he said into Thomas’s ear.

He straightened himself and began the ritual of undressing with his plain waistcoat of wool felt. Thomas sat back to better enjoy the view of his graceful fingers at work. Seeing James in his civilian clothes brought to his mind the trope of kings disguising themselves to mingle freely among their subjects, or gods who did the same to play tricks on mortals. However James could conceal himself though, as a beggar or an old peasant woman maybe, Thomas was certain he would know him. 

After he discarded his shirt, Thomas reached for the placket of his breeches but was swiftly denied with a bump of the hip. When his other hand dared to make a second attempt, it was met with a swat.

“Must I suffer so?”

With all the authority of Holy Writ, James solemnly replied, “Blessed is the man who endures trials.” 

Thomas wrinkled his nose in thought. “Is that…from the Book of James?”

James pursed his lips. His chest started to quake with barely suppressed laughter. “I’m sorry. I can’t sustain this kind of play as well as you can.”

Thomas glared at him then summarily undid his breeches. “The wig stays on.”

He placed his hands on James’s groin and traced the grooves that angled down from his hips with his thumbs. He leaned in close enough that his breath, hot wisps on his skin, caused James’s own to catch in his throat. He laid a trail of kisses down his length, and when he reached the tip, he pressed another, wetter kiss to it before laying him on his tongue.

“A-en,” he said from the back of his throat, his ‘m’ unformable.

He closed his mouth around him. Soft and delectably fat, he adored James in this state too, being able to swallow him down easily to the root and nose the hair that capped it, while inhaling the close scent of him, musky and complementary to his taste. He greedily sucked at the suppleness that was as pliant as his rolling tongue. As he drew off his lips, he teased and tugged at the loose skin before releasing him completely.

“ _Fuck_.”

James tilted Thomas’s chin up. His thumb grazed his spittle-slicked lip. With his naked form before him, so free of shame and so charged with vitality, Thomas became keenly aware of his own dress. Every immaculately stitched seam, the wig hairs that trembled against his temples, the right coat pocket weighed down by his purse. The cost and labor involved in their fabrication suddenly seemed so meaningless, and, in this scenario, sackcloth and ashes would have been more fitting. He ought to aspire to be Michelangelo’s silkworm spooling out his own life to clothe his beloved’s body. He reached up to prise his wig from his head, but James caught his hand and guided it to his cock. 

It had swelled as if by magic not blood, rising and reaching for Thomas’s mouth. He dragged his lips along the most prominent vein. The pulse was strong and steady. He licked away the first drops of fluid that gathered in the slit then spiraled his tongue around the satiny head, wetting it to glisten. He opened his mouth and took him in inch by inch, as much as his throat would allow. 

As his head bobbed on his cock, Thomas observed the fluctuations in James’s face. The clenching and unclenching of his jaw that was out of step with the flutter of his eyelids. The shaky rise and fall of his lower lip with each effortful breath. With James’s pleasure as the impetus for his own desire, each movement, however incremental, further stoked it, driving Thomas to take him faster, deeper, impeding his own breath, as if his release would release him too.

He pulled his mouth away, panting through an open smile. James emitted a clipped but agonized cry. Thomas substituted his hand and drew it up and down at a controlled tempo that kept James thrumming at a specific pitch. He took this moment to appreciate once more what he held. He had already studied the gradations of pinks and the hints of mauve against the natural pale of his skin, and made note of the little dent that added the slightest stutter to his strokes. He loved the heft of it in his hand and on his lower back just before James pushed inside of him. And when it was sheathed in his uniform and lay thick across the top of his thigh, how it beckoned him to sit between James’s feet and rest his cheek on it. 

“Thomas.”

He choked on the first syllable; the second was a rush of air. The tension that seized his face had loosened and slipped downwards to join the pressure that coiled itself tightly around the base of his cock. Thomas’s mouth and hand worked in tandem to hasten his climax, but James’s bucking hips threw his rhythm off. He clutched James’s ass with both hands for anchor, letting him set a more punishing pace.

“Thomas!”

His hands came down on Thomas’s shoulders, signaling to him to fall back. His fingers dug in, bound to leave marks, but Thomas would not withdraw until he finally burst brackish and a bit bitter on the back of his tongue. 

“Thomas…”

The last shudder was spent on the corner of his mouth. He extended his tongue as if to show James that communion was successfully received. He was no apostate, but he couldn’t help chuckling at his own blasphemy. 

James gathered what he had left dripping down the side of Thomas’s chin with his finger and laid it on the protruding tongue. He smiled approvingly as Thomas drew the finger in. As he laved it clean, James watched him attentively with clear, joyful eyes. They were eyes that saw him. Beneath the clothes, the money, the centuries-old legacy, Thomas knew that James could see him.

He reached behind Thomas’s ears and pushed his fingertips up beneath the wig. He dislodged it from his skull in a de-coronation and placed it on the dresser next to his rumpled gray cravat.

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

On the table before him was a neatly folded suit of coarse wool. Beside it was another pile of more clothing: a shirt, a pair of stockings, and a cravat. Beside that pile was a pair of shoes with a hat laid upon them. And to the right of those were two sets of shackles.

Thomas, seated, looked up at the porter. He was flanked by two guards. They he knew, but not the man who stood in the corner, a hulking, disinterested character with a patchy, greasy beard. Beneath his coat, Thomas could see a flintlock and a dagger in his belt.

He undressed and pushed the fallen clothes aside with his foot. The order in which the seemingly excessive number of articles needed to be donned momentarily perplexed him. He started with the shirt to quickly restore some modesty, and the rest followed without too much fuss, his muscle memory intact. The new clothes lay heavy on him, not unpleasantly. It was like he had put his skin back on, and he no longer needed to keep his own viscera in or guard his tender meat from the cold with his hands and arms.

With his wrists secured by manacles, he placed the hat on his head. He wondered how he looked.

The sun was rising as the guards led him to a carriage waiting outside of the entrance to the grounds. The two men pulled him aboard then left him alone with the bearded stranger. Once the carriage set out on its course, Thomas shut his eyes and tilted his head into the wind. As they barreled down Moorgate Street, the stench of the Thames grew stronger, and the sounds of life grew more animated. A rut in the road threw him forward, and his eyes snapped open. They were buffeted by the sight of muddy roads, stray dogs pissing against the quoins of buildings, bankers stepping over fresh manure, peddlers hauling baskets of eel pies. The fact of their existence made his head spin and his heart race. He really was not in Bethlem anymore.

When they reached their destination, Thomas nearly fell out of the carriage in a dither. His escort caught him and pulled him to his feet. His bruising grip on Thomas’s arm could not stop him from twisting around to take in his surroundings. He knew they had gone far past Shadwell to an area of London he wasn’t familiar with. At least, as far as he could see, there were no gallows. Just ships, many kinds, towering and alive, their masts and webs of rope tipped with silver light. Thomas could only identify with confidence the sloops, since he could never forget the one he watched James leave on for New Providence Island.

“I’m sailing,” he whispered to himself. “To where? Where am I going? Where are you taking me?” he asked, his voice getting louder and more demanding with each question.

His escort ignored him as he attached another chain to a link between Thomas’s manacles. He ushered him towards the end of the dock where a man stood by the gangplank. He handed him a folded document. The man opened it against his ledger.

“Mr. Pettijohn, there you are. And this is your, erm, cargo? God, it’s wet. Did you hold your cock with this while you had a piddle? What…I mean, what is that? Tom? Tom H. Milton, is it?”

Pettijohn shrugged. Thomas supposed they could have asked him for confirmation, or he could have volunteered to correct them. He could have told them he was a common Peter since his actual name would be of no interest to either, but that was what was written on the paper. _Tom H. Milton_. It was close enough to be him but not him at all simultaneously, a sharp reminder that only a letter separated life from a lie.

“All right. Get on. The steward will show you where you’ll be bedding down.”

As Thomas approached the ship, the gangplank bouncing beneath him, Pettijohn barking at him to slow down, the names of ship parts bubbled up into his brain in no particular order. He couldn’t match many of the terms with what he saw around him, and what he could recall with the most accuracy were James’s lips as he recited them. Masts, topmasts, the stays and the sheets, bowlines and buntlines, and…futtock shrouds. He liked to think the years in Bethlem did little to erode his trust in his own mind, but that one gave him some pause. He also acknowledged that he could have been a more attentive student if he didn’t have such a distracting tutor.

At the very least he was certain that starboard meant left.

His tongue wormed into the gap where his tooth used to be.

At the very least he was certain that starboard meant right.

“Going for a kip, so you’re coming with.”

“I can’t stay up here? I understand it will be less of an issue after we set sail, but I — please.”

“Jesus, what aren’t you fucking getting?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re my prisoner!” 

A few heads turned towards them. Thomas sighed. His nature wouldn’t stop resisting the notion that that was who he was. Even with shackles on, he easily turned towards the water and the sky. 

He took a step closer to Pettijohn, trying to impose his height on the shorter man.

“I guess appealing to any basic human kindness you may possess will not persuade you to grant me this. So…if you don’t let me stay up here, I will throw myself over the — _gun_ … _null_. I gather you will only get paid upon successful delivery. Am I correct?”

Pettijohn spat on the deck. “You think it so hard to get some other sot in shackles?”

“Knowing my father, he will have a system of confirmation in place. If there is an opportunity to deny payment, he will take it happily, and considering the lengths to which he has gone to keep me locked away, he means to have me, the correct sot, delivered, and you mean to get paid.”

Pettijohn’s lip rose in a sneer. “Christ Almighty. This is what it’s going to be like then? And I’m to trust you, a fucking bedlamite, to not do as you threatened? What’s to stop me from locking you down in the hold and beating and starving you into submission instead?”

“If that’s the tack you take, it will be unto death, I’m afraid. I am not a disagreeable man, so we might as well try to make the best of our time together.”

Pettijohn unhooked a costrel from his belt as he swore under his breath and took a generous swig from it. Thomas could smell that it did not contain water.

They stood in silence at a draw until the boatswain chased all non-personnel down below. Thomas stationed himself at a lower deck port while the crew undertook the laborious task of warping the ship out of the harbor. Pettijohn sat next to him, downing the contents of what would be the first of many bottles of one spirit or another, and intermittently grumbled about what an unholy prick Thomas’s father was. For that alone, Thomas wondered if in extremis even they could become friends. 

He eventually nodded off, leaving Thomas to concentrate on the ship’s glacially slow progress down the Thames in relative peace. With his chin in his hand, he watched the landscape gradually change to farmland, and the river widen out into the estuary. Once he saw the perpendicular line of the North Sea, he pulled on his chain, yanking Pettijohn into something like consciousness.

“Come on, Mr. Pettijohn. ‘Poor Tom shall lead thee.’”

Too soused to put up a fight, Thomas was able to drag Pettijohn behind him to the main deck. He settled them away from the hub of activity to observe the men readying the ship. He couldn’t follow all the orders barked and the hands as they unfurled the immense sails to the blinding sun. The canvas flapped wildly, the sounds slapping against his eardrums. When they finally caught the wind, suddenly snapping taut and full, Thomas felt his body lift off the deck.

His day had begun with the rising sun, and now he watched it set over the isle. The cliffs, no longer chalk white but marmalade orange, were a breathtaking sight. He’d never seen his country in this light before, and he suspected this would be the last time. He thought to rage and curse, or weep and wail. As the land shrank away, keeping with it all that it gave to then took from him, he only felt an emptiness with cold edges.

“Do you think we’ll come across pirates?”

“Feh. Bloody Spanish more like.”

When the sun was nearly gone, and the sky and sea began to resemble each other, the moon revealed its phase. A waning crescent. They were still cruising along the southern coast, which was spotted with the nebulous lights of its ports. Poole, Plymouth, and so on until they would finally pass Penzance. It would be some time before they reached open water, before they might chance upon pirates. Since they had upended his life, Thomas only thought it fair to encounter them in their milieu. Whether they might see his restraints and liberate him as one of their own, a fellow criminal and outcast, or kill him, Thomas knew the choice would not be his.

Pettijohn stirred.

“Food.”

Thomas nodded, the word giving shape to his hunger too.

They made their way to the galley and sat among the other, better dressed passengers to partake of their meals. Thomas knew that due to the war overseas travel for non-military excursions was highly restricted. Passage was sought on any vessel that was granted voyage, so this ship carried alongside royal appointees, noblemen, and members of the merchant class, peasants and prisoners. They did not look upon Pettijohn with any more favor than they did his charge, and Thomas used their disdain towards them to forge a less inimical bond. It didn’t take much afterwards to convince Pettijohn to detach his leash from him.

During his brief periods of sobriety, Thomas played at obedience to gain his trust then push it as far he could. At the first opportunity, he rifled through Pettijohn’s outer pockets. He found an extraneous lock and its accompanying key but not the one for his shackles. He carefully moved his arm and lifted open the flap of his coat. Peeking out from a crudely sewn patch pocket was the corner of a folded document. Undoubtedly his contract for work. Thomas shook with anger, knowing his father’s signature had to be on it. Before he could pilfer it, Pettijohn shifted with a loud snort, drawing the attention of another passenger. His coat slipped from between Thomas’s fingers. He retreated from the snoring body and tossed the lock out of the nearest port.

As hard as Thomas tried to engage Pettijohn, even resorting to relaying the filthiest gossip he had heard about the Queen, it was clear not much conversation would be gotten from him. So he idly wandered around the ship, visually assessing all the passengers in search of those who might be willing to talk to a man in shackles. For those who had books, Thomas didn’t hesitate to ask what they were reading. Most responded curtly if at all, while a few gladly expounded on all that occurred on the pages. A young insurance agent offered him the first volume of _Plutarch’s Lives_ after confessing the Greek aggravated his seasickness. Thomas stammered his thanks and turned the unassuming book over in his hands. They molded themselves to it as if they were remembering all those they held before.

He found himself a niche with some galley supplies and made a seat out of sacks of oats. With his head next to a port, he read slowly in an effort to extend the book’s life, but his weakened constitution could not handle the falls and swoops of all the diacritics. He paused after Theseus joined the Amazons to shut his eyes and take deep breaths to quell his nausea. When he opened them again, an unaccompanied boy stood before him.

“Christ!”

“You swore.”

“Child, should you be off on your own like this?”

“Shouldn’t you be in the hold? With the other prisoners?”

“I am not a prisoner, I am a madman,” he replied indignantly.

“Are you dangerous?”

“ _Very_.” He shook the chain between his manacles for effect, but the boy was visibly unmoved. “What is your name? If it’s Peter, I’m afraid this exchange will have to end here.”

“Not a Peter, sir. A William.”

“‘A William.’ I’ll allow it. Mine is Thomas.”

The boy brought along the few other children on board to gawk at him. He set the book aside and tried to answer their barrage of questions with aphorisms about empathy and compassion, but the little ghouls were far more interested in hearing about extreme methods of institutional punishment. When it appeared he had misplaced the book, Thomas resigned himself to pass the time by keeping company with them. They saw little reason to fear or shun him unlike their guardians. But even they became less mindful of his presence around them, his manners and perfect elocution offering them sufficient peace of mind. They even expressed their gratitude over his relieving them of the children with the occasional session with the ship’s barber.

After supper, the children followed him to a far corner of the galley where he lay prostrate on a bench and told them fairy stories to which he added his own embellishments. 

“All the princes can’t be named James,” they complained one night.

Nor could any of the princesses be named Thomas. He supposed he’d hosted worse salons than this.

After narrating fables and parables and myths and epics from all over the world, he had exhausted his memory of written tales. His audience was getting squirrely as his silence stretched on. He folded his hands beneath his head and launched into the story of a little boy the moon watched over every night. As he continued, a look of suspicion washed across their unwashed faces. They began to balk in unison. 

“That’s not a real fairy story.”

“Who said that? Fairy stories aren’t real, you little —”

Unsatisfied with his latest performance, they disbanded and diverted themselves by tapping biscuits on the floor to see if weevils would tumble out. Insulted that they had chosen stale bread over him, Thomas left them to make his way to his former reading nook. The sacks had been rearranged, and he spotted the book he had thought lost, peeking out from beneath one. He swept it up in a panic and crossed his arms over it. He pressed it hard enough against his chest to hurt, wishing he could safeguard it within his ribcage. While he was fond of his possessions when he had them, he had not dwelled much on them since. Except for that book. That… 

He loosened his hold on it. He hadn’t marked where he left off so he started again with the birth of Theseus.

As the food and drink began to diminish and illness spread, sleep comprised more and more of the passengers’ days. Thomas saw William less and less, until he never saw him again. Late into the night, when delirium and darkness joined to play their tricks, the creak and groan of the slatting became the creak and groan of the gallows as the weighted rope pulled on its joints. Some nights it was James, barefooted and swinging, some nights it was Miranda, some nights it was himself. No matter who, he always stood on the dock and stared in silence.

Before dawn, he hauled himself to the quarterdeck, enervated but restless. There was a break in the rain, but the air, smelling cleanly of ozone, was heavy with more. He sat on some coiled hawser, his knowledge of sailing terminology considerably improved, and watched the endless horizon bulge with the suggestion of daylight. Although he’d seen this many times, it never failed to fill him with awe.

He wondered how a young James felt when he first witnessed such things. Did he think could drown in the pummeling downpour of a cloudburst? Did his hair stand on end when lightning ignited the night all around him like noiseless fireworks? Did the empty sky and the empty sea try to mesmerize him into walking off the bowsprit? He hated that he would never know the answers, but his heart still beat a little faster when thunder rumbled in the distance. 

The rain started to fall again. Thomas recognized Pettijohn’s approach without having to look. If he could be relied on for anything, it was to retrieve him from wherever he had planted himself before middle watch. Despite being drunker than a lord every day, he always took him down into the hold, where below the water line, the cold clamped onto his bones. Having somehow lost the lock and its key, Pettijohn let Thomas sleep in his hammock instead of the veritable cage that was originally intended for him. Every night he passed out on a bed of straw in Thomas’s pen, a far easier thing to drunkenly recline in, and proceeded to snore and fart with the easiness of a truly unencumbered soul.

Then it came, always when Thomas least expected it, after his mind had gone days without a single thought about him. 

He turned a page in his book, the chafe and snap breaking the silence. James had assumed a peculiar position at the head of the bed with his knees drawn up to his chin. Thomas wondered why he was sitting on the pillows like that. He stepped away from his writing desk, just as James slid off the bed to meet him. His shirt was too long. It nearly reached his knees. Thomas pressed the book to his chest when James put his arms around him. He was so much taller, a full head taller, and Thomas shrank in his embrace. It was strong and warm, everything he remembered it to be.

“It’s all right, Thomas. You can hold me too,” James said, chuckling softly. “Why won’t you put your arms around me?”

“Because you’re dead. Because you’re dead.”

“Now how can I be holding you if I’m dead?”

Thomas trembled in fear of his own madness. 

_No. No. No. No. No._

He woke up where he had lain and not in a room of red light and endless night. During moments such as these, when his awareness of his loneliness had been sharpened to a fine point, only James or Miranda could possibly soothe him. 

He bit into the corner of his book. He wouldn’t cry. He refused to cry.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

The ship’s destination was not the Bahama islands or the Carolina colony as Thomas had presumed, but the Georgia colony. Many of the passengers would make the five-day trek from there to Jamestown, where, for the name alone, Thomas thought he should go as well, but his suggestion for a change in itinerary went unheeded. 

Once aground, Thomas felt like a new man even though the shackles were very much the same old English ones. His clothes hung off of him for a start, and his beard easily exceeded what James returned with from his three-month sojourn. The unobstructed sun melted his blood, and it circulated throughout him again, turning his translucent jelly body back into solid, sanguine flesh. The faint trembling of his hands ceased, and sweat soaked through his collar. Maybe he would no longer be so frost-tender in this heat. Maybe he would feel human again.

While the other prisoners were corralled onto open carts, Thomas was led to a private carriage.

“Get on.”

Thomas eyed the dagger Pettijohn had at the ready.

“What do you think I am capable of now?”

“Jeeesus Chriiist, get the fuck up.”

“I swear on Plutarch and my mother’s grave, I am a man of peace and equanimity. Have I not shown you this for the weeks we have been bound together?”

“For fuck’s sake.”

Détente over, Pettijohn struck Thomas across the temple. Eyes rattling in his skull, he fell sideways into the carriage and vomited over the back wheel.

He spat on the ground before facing Pettijohn again. 

“Yes, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you see I can’t board with these fucking things on my fucking ankles?” 

The New World seemed to have given him a new mouth as well. Waving the dagger at him, Pettijohn ordered the coachman to help Thomas into the carriage. After much stepping on of hands and clambering, they were finally seated and trundling down the road.

Thomas inched closer to the window, earning a warning glare and a show of the flintlock.

“Is the powder in that still any good?”

His eyes became slits.

“Making conversation.”

His boldness might have grown too with the distance between him and England. Without another thought to Pettijohn, he leaned into the window. The world that rolled past the carriage had just been an idea in his mind and rutted shapes on a map, representing promise and opportunity for any man. Even with no certainty of a future, Thomas still felt that to be true.

The harbor town was nothing more than a handful of timber structures, so they were soon far from signs of civilization. The land that was corrugated with inlets and saltwater creeks gave way to uninterrupted stretches of tall grasses and forest. As the sun set, the fields turned into shuddering planes of orange and gold. The sting of the light tricked Thomas’s eyes into seeing fire on the horizon. 

The colors and verdant smells reminded him of his summer in Tuscany. After the heat relented to the breeze, and he walked the hills alone, steeped in the hagiographies of men who took the same paths while carrying their own severed heads. Instead of cypresses and scrubby olive trees, expansive oaks and maples stood tall on the land. The sky and the earth felt new too somehow and yet ancient still. He suspected there would be ghosts waiting for him here as well. 

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

There was that face again, looking up at him from the water. They nodded in greeting, not having seen each other since Bethlem. They both noted that the water was warm, and the provided soap was more than a slice of tallow and lye. It was finely milled, and its perfume of lavender oil mingled with the hothouse’s scents of damp loam and resin. They were confident this would be the only time they would touch such soap.

“Lean back.” 

Thomas rested the back of his head on the lip of the hip bath, exposing his throat. The desire to have the beard removed overrode any initial fears until he caught the glint of light off a blade. As the man approached, he dragged a floor candelabra with him. The raking of the wrought iron legs against the flagstone shredded the silence.

Another man, who sat in a corner out of Thomas’s sight, halted the scritch of his quill. 

“Pick it up.”

The man made a series of humbled noises and transported the candelabra with more care.

“This can’t possibly wait until morning?” Thomas asked.

“You don’t trust our attendant?”

“Oh, god, no.”

He chuckled mirthlessly and resumed writing.

Thomas looked up at the inverted face. The man displayed the razor to him.

“I’m very good at this.”

Thomas swallowed hard and shut his eyes.

“Mr. Oglethorpe informed me that you were transferred from bedlam,” the man in the corner remarked. 

“And he would let that be the only thing anyone knows about me.”

Since his scars stopped itching and had simply become part of his topography, Thomas was quick to forget about them. He now wondered how they appeared to his onlookers when he was ordered to undress before them, if they all recognized them for what they were.

The attendant turned towards the man in the corner then to the armed guards at the entrance. 

“Am I safe, Mr. Farrowgate?”

“It’s late, Mr. De Vries. Please tend to the tasks at hand so that we may go home.”

Not looking completely reassured, he began anyway, starting halfway down Thomas’s neck. That familiar scrape and smell of wet stone. He held his breath as the blade traversed his Adam’s apple.

“When we’re done here, these gentlemen will show you to your bed. With the first ten tolls, you will rise. The next three, you will eat. The next five, you will gather at the southern field. The next three, you will break mid-day. The next five, you will resume work. The next five, you will cease work. The next three, you will eat. The next ten, you will return to your quarters.”

“And when to sneeze or shit?” Thomas asked. One of the guards snickered.

“Judging by the book that was in your possession, you are a learned man. So I trust you will figure out when to sneeze or shit for yourself.” 

The quill’s scritch ceased. The shaving completed. Mr. De Vries had done a fine enough job and commenced clipping Thomas’s hair.

After he dressed in the provided clothes, Thomas could hear the man Farrowgate clear his throat behind him. He turned, seeing him finally. He was younger than Thomas but somehow older. His face was stern, imperious. His dark eyes seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. He presented Thomas’s book to him. He hesitantly accepted it, and the man exited swiftly ahead of all of them, the ledger tucked under his arm. 

The guards didn’t bind him or even grip him by the elbows as Pettijohn had done. He walked between them, unable to see more than a few feet around. Insects crisscrossed in the torchlight and more leaped high out of the grass to escape their steps. They walked in silence, but the dark teemed with unknowable chattering. Even under these circumstances, Thomas found the dark oddly comforting. It was in the dark, he scarpered to the groundskeeper’s quarters where Oswyn showed him his seed catalogue. It was in the dark, he awoke in James’s bed in the middle of the night after sleep sneaked up on both of them. It was in the dark he couldn’t see the walls of his new prison.

He was led to a low-slung structure that housed twenty beds. As he walked down the aisle, a raised torch showing him the way, he could see the wet of open eyes as they followed him. _Here comes a new one_ , the scent of lavender announced. He took the bed in the corner against the wall, beneath a high, small window. When the door was shut, there was no clank of an iron lock, only the shuck of worn wood against worn wood. After the light of the guards’ torches faded and his eyes adjusted to the dark, Thomas ventured back outside. He cautiously stepped forward until his feet no longer felt grass but moist, yielding soil. He stumbled upon a large rock on the perimeter of what smelled like a recently tilled field.

Thomas sat down on it and yawned. The warm breeze was welcome on his clean skin. He shut his eyes and ran his hand over his freshly shorn head. He traced the scar that had been buried under matted, salt-stiffened hair. It was no longer the grotesque grin his fingertips previously told him it was but a thin, negligible crease. He opened his eyes and looked towards the direction he came from, wondering how far he had gone and if he could find his way back. As they struggled to find contrast that was barely there, a tiny light bobbed in the blackness, blinkering as it approached him.

He flinched when it alighted on his arm. He had never seen such a thing in England. It was dozy enough to capture easily between his hands. He held it close to his face and stared in wonder at its pulsating glow, a smile curling the corner of his mouth. He opened his hands, releasing it, and followed it upwards with his eyes until it merged with the celestial sphere. The night sky in London or even in Ashbourne was nothing like this one. Its clarity and depth were more than man was equipped to perceive with any adequacy. Thomas just managed to discern from the densely speckled and spattered swirl the constellations he could identify courtesy of James’s attempt to explain how to calculate latitude from the stars. 

They were sitting on the roof of the house with a lamp between them. Thomas was wrapped in one of Miranda’s furs and about three sheets to the wind, while James was alert and eager to point out Cassiopeia and Orion’s armpit. He had abruptly stopped talking when Thomas fell uncharacteristically silent.

“Have I lost you?” James asked.

“No. Not at all.”

_I have lost you._

Thomas cleared his throat then patted the space on the rock next to him. 

“I can’t believe… Polaris, Thomas. The North Star.”

“Ah, yes, of the pole.” Thomas pointed. “There. There it is.”

James’s sigh was heavy and drawn out. “You’re sure about that?”

“Yes,” he answered firmly.

James reached up and directed Thomas’s finger towards eleven o’ clock. “Do you see it now?”

“I always understood the North Star to be the brightest star.”

“That is the brightest star.”

“No — “ 

James stayed Thomas’s hand before he could return it to its previous position. “That is the brightest star.”

“No.” Thomas’s hand came down in a straight line until the tip of his finger pointed to James’s chest. “This is.”

One eye narrowed into a squint, the realization that Thomas had been toying with him all along setting in.

“That’s an awfully long way to go to reach the end of a joke.”

“I know. But it was clever. Yes?”

James’s arched eyebrow answered in the contrary. 

“Perhaps we should move on to the moon,” Thomas suggested. 

“Shall I explain its effect on the tides?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

It was too dark to see, but Thomas could tell from how he drew his lips tight against his teeth and wouldn’t fully meet his eyes that he was blushing. The thought of his fair skin turning pink was enough to compel him to throw his arms around him and kiss him repeatedly and fervently and thank him for his love and his existence and beg him to forgive him, please, for all the times he was indulged or arrogant or insensitive. But of course he was not there.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> istg there's a point to these sex setpieces. i'm just not a deft enough a writer to pull it off anyway so enjoy what will end up being gratuitous bonking. (do i really need to add a cock worship tag to this? i should probably add a lot more tags to this.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lotsa chatting + a wee bit of spanking

Thomas was taught that men like him took, because they could, and those who gave would only know loss. When his mother passed, he wasn’t a child so it would not have been becoming of him to weep. He touched her bloodless hand and asked if it was worth it, to give so much to a man who never replenished what he took. She tilted her head the way she always did if he was being inappropriate. Which was often. This had become a private joke of theirs, but Thomas had no air to spare for laughter. He begged her to admit that she hated him, to show any part of herself that she concealed out of deference to his father, but she stressed his filial duties instead. He knew it was her quiet strength that had kept the peace in their house so he blandly promised her that he would be a good son. She smiled at his barely disguised insincerity, and Thomas wept anyway.

Looking ahead to their future together, he and Miranda vowed on the day before their wedding to never be the husband and wife their parents were, or allow custom and moral obligation to deform them to fit into those roles. Between them, all things would flow back and forth so that one didn’t have more or less than the other. This had made Miranda the not-so-secret envy of some wives whose husbands thought themselves so clever when they “accidentally” addressed Thomas by her honorific. Unworthy of even mockery, he and Miranda did not deign to pity them either. What they had created in partnership was as close to a complete life as was possible, something those people would never see the light of.

 _The curtains_ , Thomas thought.

“Close…the…”

 _Curtains_.

He normally awoke to the clearing of Houghton’s throat, not the sun bleeding red through his eyelids, but this was not his room, and those definitely were not his curtains. 

His ink-stained fingers twitched on the pillow, and he remembered. Peter had appeared unexpectedly at the house with the news that Thomas’s father coerced Sutton into withdrawing his support. Thomas threw something. With Miranda tending to her sick aunt, he sought remedy for his unrest that was not at the bottom of a bottle, so he appeared unexpectedly at James’s door. When it opened, a noise of relief burst from him like a sob. It felt right being there as every place without him no longer did. James didn't ask questions and helped him undress for bed.

He was reading Exquemelin’s exploits in buccaneering again. Engrossed in the book, he was quite a sight to behold and doused the agony of the early hour. The light, even at its most English, had a wonderful effect on his eyes, and that morning it turned the crystalline irises eau-de-nil green as they darted back and forth across the page. At a particularly interesting passage, James brought his knuckle to his lip and furrowed his brow. Amused, he breathed out through his nose and nodded. Thomas intently watched his fingertip drag down the top corner of the page into a curl then slip beneath it. As he turned the page over, Thomas folded down the covers to expose his torso. And his very stiff cock.

“James,” he called. His voice was thick and scratchy.

“If you mean to attend service, you will have to get out of bed,” James said without looking. 

“But —”

“You are more than capable of taking matters into your own hands.”

“But —” 

James opened the side table drawer and retrieved a nearly empty bottle of oil from it. “You could think on…Lord Winterslag. Wintersloth. Winterslu—” 

“Please don’t do that. You know his name.”

“Sorry.”

“Why would you have me think on him when you are the chief occupant of my heart?” 

“As you are mine, but surely inspiration comes from more than one spring.” 

James nudged Thomas’s cock to the left to shift its singled-minded attention away from him, but it immediately drifted back to the right. 

“All right.” He shut the book. “Lord Seton’s party.”

“Oh. Oh… I had the brilliant idea of _anointing_ his new garden temple. And…ohhhh. I couldn’t sit right for days.” Thomas snickered and opened his hand. James shook the last drops of oil into it. “God, those Doric columns —“

“Focus.”

Thomas nestled his head deeper into the pillow and applied the oil to himself in one stroke.

They had stolen away to Seton’s gardens after Thomas suggested this more stimulating way to entertain themselves than listening to the anecdotes of the feckless rich. The sliver moon offered them little assistance with finding the path, but they forged ahead, bumbling blindly across the lawn, their confidence boosted by much wine. They took turns shoving the other forward to be the shield against any unforeseen trees or plinths. The shoving gradually became grappling, a breathless, teasing play at dominance. With their arms locked like the horns of battling rams, they rotated clumsily together, panting and grunting as they drove into each other with their shoulders. They pushed in no particular direction, their feet sliding through wet grass, until Thomas found himself inside of a tall hedge, and a victor was declared. Their laughter rang out in the hushed atmosphere as James disentangled him from the shrubbery. They concluded his stuck wig was beyond rescuing and surrendered it to the twigs.

Setting their sights back on their mission, James brandished his sheathed sword to feel for any obstacles and proceeded with Thomas gripping his waist from behind. They finally, miraculously came upon the path to the temple, its white gravel bright enough to lead them on. As they walked side-by-side, their giddiness mellowed into a comfortable silence. James reached out and loosely intertwined their fingers. Thomas’s face, flushed already, grew a bit warmer. Time and again, the fact of them, like that hand in his, could still catch him by surprise.

When they reached the landing at the top of the temple steps, Thomas grabbed James through his breeches. With a grin free of any intimation of future tenderness, he led him by the cock into the limestone structure. At its center was a statue of a French Sphinx, which Thomas was able to identify by touch. With a childish giggle, he guided James’s hands to its preposterously round breasts, but his hands were more invested in clawing Thomas’s breeches open. The force of his need knocked him backwards into the statue’s sloped back. He shivered at the cold of the marble and at the heat of James’s tongue between his lips and his hands as they hastily tugged his breeches down his hips.

The same mouth and fingers came to aid Thomas with his task in the present, nibbling at his nipple and skimming circles on his testicles. James lifted his head for a kiss but stopped short when he saw that the previously gaping mouth had tightened up into a smile.

“What could possibly be amusing you now?”

“ _You_.” Thomas opened his eyes and relaxed his hand. “Bending me over the Sphinx and smacking my arse.”

“We — you were rather drunk.” James raised an eyebrow. “So maybe you can’t recall your very vocal encouragement of said arse smacking.”

“Days later and Miranda could still distinguish each finger.”

Thomas had sat her down his bed and lowered his breeches to display his mementos of the party. She laid her hands on the imprints and lined up her fingers with James’s, uniting the three of them in this absurd tableau. 

With a squeeze, she said, “Your bottom seems to have gotten bigger. Is that a normal consequence of excessive usage?”

James threw his head back and laughed. A resonant, bed-shaking laugh. 

He flipped Thomas onto his stomach and lowered his head for inspection. 

“You tell tales, sir. I see no such mark,” he said gravely. 

He swept a hand over his buttock before solidly clapping it.

“Hm. Now I do see a hint of color. Like the blush of a maiden’s cheek.” 

Thomas pushed himself up to face James. “All this time I thought the Navy infamous for its harsh disciplinarians, but I can’t even compare that to a breeze on a summer da—” 

The clarion sound of impact in the lull of morning jarred them briefly into stillness. It wasn’t hard enough to welt but enough to charge his arousal with a thought-melting intensity. He raised his hips off the bed, a reflex of his desire, and his knees slid apart on the sheets. He could feel each vibrating atom of air that brushed against the sensitive skin from his entrance to his sac, but what his body wanted, it often knowing better than his mind, was that firm hand upon him again.

The initial smack must have forcibly shaken something free, and as if a gate was unlatched, what appetites had been constrained rode roughshod over their judgment. Having nothing on them to facilitate the act, Thomas fell to his knees and slavered all over James’s cock like a man starved. Preparation made this an infrequently chosen form of congress for them, but in that moment getting fucked by James over a grotesque statue was the only thing that made sense in their mad world. 

As James sank into him, the faces and voices of those people, his friends, his peers, _his_ people, in Seton’s house faded into a hazy, buzzy white. His mind tunneled narrower and narrower until all that existed was the two of them — the raw burn of James’s cock inside of him, his buttons skittering on stone and spittle cooling on his chin, the Sphinx’s impassive face behind his searching fingers, their mismatched litanies of swears. A hard snap of the elbow, and James’s hand landed where it struck before. The blow resounded in the temple and in the hollow of Thomas’s chest.

He positioned himself over James, bracketing his head and waist with his hands and knees. James wrapped his fingers around his cock and roughly thumbed the slit. His other hand slid over the curve of Thomas’s behind and pressed into the skin that held onto the residual warmth of the smack. Eyes shut and moaning low, he rested his head against the headboard for support. He rocked into James’s hand as phantom hips rocked into him from behind. He could still feel his hole stretching to accommodate his girth and the sting on his skin that was alive with its own beating heart.

James worked his length in twisting motions that tightened around the tip. Before Thomas could crest, he stayed his hand and resumed only when the swell had sufficiently dropped. He repeated this mercilessly, as Thomas had done to him, generating a torturous ebbing and flowing and falling and rising, in which Thomas helplessly swayed. Caught in the upward draft of his gasps was the word he chanted in Seton’s showy new garden feature. 

_Harder_.

Thomas dug his fingers into James’s pillow and ground the top of his head into the wall. Just as he was about to spill, the hand came to a full stop. 

“J-James!” 

Teetering on the edge, he began to shake.

“Look at me. I need to see…” James’s tone when gentle yet assertive usually had such a power over him, but wound too tightly, he couldn’t obey. 

James reached around Thomas’s head and threaded his fingers through his hair. They curled into a fist and brought his head away from the wall.

“Thomas, you’re… Tho—”

“Ja—”

“ _Thomas_.”

On his name, spoken like an order, his back snapped into an arch then bowed as deeply as his bones could bend. He expelled in convulsions then in a single, final twitch what felt like his own life onto James’s chest. He dropped heavily onto his side, half-mumbling, half-laughing an apology for messing his shirt. Paying it no mind, James straightened his oddly angled limbs for him then pulled the covers back up. In the bed that was never big enough, Thomas had become curiously small.

Neither did make it to his respective church to pray for the other’s delinquent soul. Thomas slept while James continued to read to get the most out of the light. They broke once from their lazy afternoon to have tea and toast with Mrs. Miller’s cats. The cross-eyed one followed them back to James’s room and claimed the space next to the stove.

Thomas undressed and burrowed back into bed. James opened his book.

“Shall I read to you?”

Thomas moved in closer as his response. James’s eyes, the left greener than the bluer right, ran down the page until he found his place. 

“‘From the said prize we had information given us that there was another ship coming from Lima, with one hundred thousand pieces of eight or more; which ship was to sail ten or twelve days after them, and which they said could not be long before she arrived at Panama…’”

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

When he was halfway to the halfway point of the row, Thomas turned back to see how many of the stalks he left in his wake had been gathered up by Jonson, who was whistling a perversely cheerful tune. As he trudged back and forth, ankle-deep in cane debris, the melody dipped in and out of Thomas’s ears. By the time he reached the end of his song, Thomas had arrived at the halfway point. There, he looked towards the halfway point of the latter half of the row. One cart was now full, and Jonson was whistling the same tune again. At the next row, Thomas approximated where its halfway point lay, and then the halfway point of the first half. At the end of this row, the mid-day bell should toll.

Thomas grit his teeth as he unfurled himself inch by stiff inch on the ground. He groaned loudly, any scrap of decorum having been long abandoned.

The officers at Bethlem believed insolation was a major cause of madness, but in England, it was not a major cause for concern. This scalding sun though could convince Thomas that they were right for once. He knitted his fingertips over his face to shield his eyes from it. The palm of his left hand was bleeding, the leaves like fine razors drawn over and over it again. The seepage from broken blisters mixed with sap and soil to create a layer of sticky mud on the right. A crude imitation of his treatments. The state of his humors had to be nothing short of appalling.

He unrolled his sleeves and ripped away strips with his teeth. Another prisoner hovered over him, his head backlit into blackness.

“What daft thing are you doing now?”

“Ah. Metternich. I could use another hand. Actually two if you can spare yours.”

Metternich squatted next to him with a grunt. Thomas could see his eyes flit over his scars as he wrapped the material around his hands.

“Good man.”

He sat down next to Thomas and fanned himself with his hat. 

“May I ask how long have you been here?”

“I reckon a year and a day.”

“Do you know of anyone escaping?”

“Escaping? Right, and who here’s got the steel for that, do you think? The chicken thieves? The bedlamites?” Metternich nudged Thomas in the shoulder with his foot. “Oh, er, maybe Lord Whosit or Jonson over there. Jonson used to make sieves, you know. _Sieves_.”

Thomas propped himself up on his elbows to look at Jonson, who was bent like a holy man beneath the basket on his back. He thought of St. Benedict and the miracle of the sieve. He thought of the significance of the most mundane of utilitarian objects to man’s progress. He thought of how dignity should be found in all work however lowly it might appear. But this was no salon of his. He wondered if Jonson would even hear his words past the echoes of his privilege. 

He groaned again and lay back down. If he remained still enough, perhaps someone would shovel dirt onto his prone body and recite the Beatitudes over him.

“Surely there have been sieve makers throughout history who have gone above and beyond what was expected of them.”

“What, you think Jonson’s going to lead a charge and start lopping heads off with a billhook? You ever even tussled with more than a knot in your cravat?”

“I was involved in a few unfortunate incidents when I was young.” 

A few unfortunate incidents with one too many of Keswick’s jilted lovers and that ghastly cousin of his. Thomas cringed as he recalled skinned knuckles and torn shirts, his even ghastlier uncle slapping him until his mouth filled with blood.

“Is that so? You kill any of them while you were at it?”

Thomas looked at him with sheer incredulity, and they burst out laughing.

“You think if you had the chance to —“ Metternich ran a finger across his throat. “You could do in Oglethorpe or even Piglet like that?”

“Is someone’s life in immediate danger?”

“No. It’s just you and he, and he’s sitting there on his arse, drinking his tea. And nary a Waltham about.”

Thomas sighed. He had thought about such things. He had imagined how satisfying it would be to feel the crack of bone, of Peter’s bones, beneath his heel. What resistance there might be from his father’s flesh if a blade entered between his ribs. As a consequence, he had also pondered the transformative power of anger and despair.

Metternich shrugged and put his hat back on. “Some people make war. Some people make sieves. I can’t say that I’m interested in doing either.”

A piercing whistle silenced them. Thomas reluctantly rose from his grave and joined the queue with the other stragglers. 

Upon entering the mess, they were all men again and not just the sum of their productivity. The grinding toil and the insurmountable walls couldn’t deny them their nature. No small thing to Thomas after Bethlem. They became loud and generous with their opinions, and, to his ears, this could be the floor of the chamber if the accents and insults about one’s mother were more refined. A fight erupted, men being men, and the guards hauled away the less chastened of the two. Dread descended and muzzled their tongues and egos. But only for a minute.

“Every. Bloody. Day,” Metternich mumbled.

Thomas ate his knob of bread in studied pieces as he listened to the men next to him apply their farming practices to the plantation. With dueling fingers, they plotted the fields on the long tables of weathered wood and argued over which crops to rotate and what to grow for cover during the peak of summer. It wasn’t difficult to recognize that the sugarcane was too green to be harvesting now. One smelled and tasted it, and these men were personally affronted by this. Thomas suspected they were trying to beat weather that did not exist down in the West Indies.

The bell to return to work tolled too soon as always. The former farmers didn’t hear it over their spirited discussion about pest management. The others dragged their feet towards the doors, taking with them whatever food remained on the tables. Metternich elbowed Thomas out of the fog of exhaustion that started to smother his limbs and senses. He shoved the rest of the bread into his mouth and slipped a small apple into his pocket.

Far past the optimal age for fieldwork, Thomas spent half his days at the mill, unloading the incoming carts. He didn’t have to walk too far from the mess to smell scorched sugar and see the air ripple with the heat from the fires. He hoped age would continue to favor him in this respect, and he would never have to work in the hellmouth of the boiling room. 

In the fields, the drivers set the pace of work, but the turning of the trapiche propelled the rhythm of the mill. It regularly operated through the night, and when it didn’t, it did in one’s dreams. Once Thomas could hear its motions, the apparatus readily assumed the inner workings of his mind. He had resisted it at first, but then the wooden clattering became another language to gain fluency in. Its words came in a steady delivery: keep moving, ignore the chafing of your shoes, do not blink when sweat dripped into your eyes, bend here, bend there. Get up. Keep moving. It gave order to a senseless existence, but a hand grabbing a stalk too high up emphatically reminded him of how illusory order was.

Thomas had never heard a scream like that, not even in Bethlem.

“Fuuuuck,” Waltham growled, machete in hand. 

Thomas spun away from the site, but he could still see what followed in the blunted sound of steel striking bone. 

“You!” 

He hesitantly turned towards the voice. Gleaming beads of blood dripped down into the creases of Waltham’s face. 

“Come on! You have both of yours.”

Thomas girded himself as he approached the mill. His eyes fell onto the masticated arm on the ground. Quickly set upon by the ubiquitous flies, it was nearly black with them and shimmered with their wings. He wrenched his gaze from it in order to shift the sluice from the cistern. He dropped it, his hands shaking. Rivulets of the spilled liquid raced each other on the packed dirt and mingled with the blood and manure. Thomas clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. _The smell_.

Farrowgate emerged from the curing room, unwinding his cravat. He swiftly tied it around what was left of Bainbridge’s arm just below the shoulder, and the burgundy geyser dwindled to a trickle.

“Milton, over here. Now.”

Thomas straightened himself and rushed over, picking up Farrowgate’s fallen hat along the way. He climbed onto the back of the cart as he and Waltham raised Bainbridge’s body up to him. The cart lurched forward into a rattling tear. Thomas hopelessly waved the flies away from Bainbridge with the hat. Drenched, he looked like he’d been flayed down to his knees. 

When they reached the great house, Thomas pulled him off the cart and carried him inside. The screaming housemaids scattered like chickens as he deposited the body on the entrance hall rug.

Farrowgate put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Return the cart. There won’t be more fieldwork today.”

Thomas could hardly hear him over the frantic beat of his blood. He managed a nod and exited. He leaned against the front of the house to collect himself. The horse snorted, calling him back to the world, and he remembered the apple in his pocket.

As he led the horse back, he stumbled into wheel tracks and tripped over rocks and nothing, his feet so far from the rest of him. The sun baked his blood-soaked shirt and sharpened the stench. He frantically pulled it up over his head, knocking the hat off, and flung it away, revolted by the wet and warmth of it. Not quickly enough though, and nausea brought him to knees. After no more would come forth from his stomach, the contractions wrung tears from his eyes and the air from his lungs. His fists were full of dirt.

_Get up. Keep moving._

He patted the hat before putting it back on. Bile clung stubbornly to the back of his throat, flavoring every swallow with sourness. He began to worry about getting hungry too soon. He worried about his teeth. He tugged at the reins and urged the horse on in a voice it couldn’t have been able to hear. When they reached the northern field, Thomas gave the horse its promised apple.

Acutely aware of his state of undress, Thomas draped the wet towel around his neck after he washed. He climbed to the roof of his barrack where he watched the guards account for the tools, and the remaining prisoners at the mill leave in no rush. With it out of commission and hours to go before the supper bell, there was naught for most of them to do since cut cane spoiled quickly. Some napped while others sat in the shade, idly swatting at gnats and chatting.

The scene before him could be called bucolic, one that might be painted. He surveyed the fields and beyond the walls, the forest that abutted the mountains, and above them all, the cirrus clouds that scored the sky. In a far clearing, a column of smoke rose from the sacks of rats they usually burned at the end of the day.

He wondered what they would think if they saw these things. If they could find good and beauty here when there was no love. He quietly bade the sun to drive him mad so that he could talk to the dead.

He raised his knees and rested his head on them. His wandering fingers found the small bony protrusion in his side. A distraction more reliable than the scars. He circled it compulsively, stopping only to press on it as if he could push it back into place.

“Off the bloody roof, you!”

Everything here was too bright, too keen and cutting. He squinted over his knees at Buxton who looked up at him with his hand on his cudgel.

“Farrowgate said to bring you some clean togs, but, er, you have your own legs.” He took a squelching bite out of a peach. “And arms.”

 _Prick_.

He had no desire to return to the house, but there he stood at the bottom of the steps again, feeling the chill off Farrowgate’s glare.

“You’re telling me Mr. Buxton did not bring the garments to you?”

Thomas, still quite shirtless, put his hands on his hips. “He is, how shall I put it, as useful as a pisspot with a hole in the bottom.”

It was easy to intuit that there was no love lost between these two, and Buxton wasn’t exactly in Thomas’s favor either. Exploiting the mutual dislike of a third party was a cheap way to gain entry into someone’s good graces, but it was one of the few tools at his disposal, and here tools were expected to be used swiftly and with economy. Farrowgate’s mask shifted just enough for him, and he walked up the steps to meet him on the veranda.

“I gave —“ He looked past Farrowgate to the maid standing behind him. “Miss, I apologize for giving you such a fright when I arrived.”

Farrowgate looked over his shoulder to her and nodded. She held out a bundle of clothing as far as her arms could stretch. Thomas smiled his thanks as he accepted it. She blushed furiously and scuttled away at a fast clip.

Thomas handed the hat back to Farrowgate. Dried gore stippled the dark wool felt.

“A Robert Davis, is it?” The name roused something vestigial in Thomas. “Perhaps it is too fine a hat for a place like this.”

“It’s a hat. It doesn’t know what kind of place this is.”

Farrowgate gave the stains no thought and tucked it beneath his arm.

“What will happen to Mr. Bainbridge? Is he to come back here?”

“If he lives, he will not be able to work. He will be sent to prison up north until his debts are repaid, and Mr. Oglethorpe is compensated for the loss of his labor.”

“What? Will Mr. Bainbridge be compensated for his… _loss_?”

“His son can replace him here if he is willing.”

“His son’s a fu—. His son’s a child.”

“What would you have me tell you? That is what the law allows.”

The law, that which was always so rigorously applied to the poor. Thomas huffed in exasperation. There was no trace of Bainbridge’s blood in the entrance hall, but he caught the whiff of iron.

“What law is Mr. Oglethorpe complying with by detaining me without cause? Let us not pretend some flexibility is out of the question.”

Thomas flinched. He drew his lips in between his teeth as if he could dam his words and old habits now. Farrowgate stiffened, and the mask shifted back into place.

“Assisting me today does not give you license to talk freely. Now get back to your quarters.”

There was little bite to his tone, but his response hit upon something solid within Thomas. Another artifact. Another fragment of a previous life that had somehow retained its definition.

Farrowgate turned around and walked briskly towards the back of the house. Thomas’s eyes dropped away from the diminishing figure to the floor. He noticed a new rug had been set down. 

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Every quarter, each prisoner was granted the privilege of meeting with Farrowgate in Oglethorpe’s office. There he submitted them to a battery of disinterested questions about their health and living conditions before updating them on the amount of resources they had consumed and how that counted against their debts. He left little air in between, and soon one was ushered out of the room just as the next man ushered in. For those whose reasons for imprisonment were categorized as miscellaneous met directly with Oglethorpe.

His office was lined on one side with shelves of ledgers and books, the spines bleached and crackled by the sun. Behind Oglethorpe’s desk, there was no image of Christ but a portrait of Queen Anne wearing an expression of deathly boredom. On the other side of the room, hung between two large windows, was a painting of the colony’s trustees, each pasty figure depicted with the same periwig and the same weak chin. Thomas absentmindedly rubbed a knuckle against his own modestly proportioned chin.

He sat down and watched Oglethorpe drain his teacup. He set it down next to a short stick with eagle feathers attached to it with a leather thong. It was not an object that could do much damage if the desire to cause some compelled Thomas to follow through on Metternich’s hypothetical.

Oglethorpe waved the guards out of the room then smiled broadly at him. Thomas had spent enough time around powerful men to recognize an assertion of authority behind the guise of good faith and did not return the smile. Oglethorpe cleared his throat and broke eye contact, putting an end to this particular confrontation. 

Farrowgate walked over from his desk to present him with a ledger. Oglethorpe opened it, licked his finger — a little too much for Thomas’s taste — and turned to the appropriate page. His presumably, but it was canted away so he couldn’t see. He gave it a cursory review before shutting the ledger.

“Mr. Mil—“

“Do you take your tea with sugar?”

“I — pardon?”

“Do you take your tea with sugar?”

Ah. He could hear the rustling of his father’s coat against the upholstery of a dining chair, the tut-tutting of his teachers. Every face that ever looked at him with haughty disdain blended into the one before him now.

“And here I thought we would have a conversation about the weather. Like civilized people.”

“Civilized people. Of course. If you wish to talk about the weather, we can talk about the unusually early frost you had last year, and how half the crop did not survive it. What a distressing time it must have been for you. And I suppose in order to avoid the possibility of a recurrence, you’ve decided to reap early. A woefully impractical decision. Or so I have been told.”

“Working beside farmers does not a farmer make.” 

“I…I am sorry. My mind…after bedlam is not as resilient as it used to be.”

Thomas leaned forward and vigorously rubbed his temples. The buzzing of a horse fly sliced through the dense silence.

“Would you prefer to —“

“I do apologize. A savage pain comes on when I think about all the labor that is going into processing such a small yield for an inferior product you cannot possibly be profiting from. Why this fruitless enterprise? I am curious, is all. For my head’s sake.”

“Because of your father, you believe you are of some authority on this?”

“Authority? No. No, no. I am of no authority, sir. That is plain. I simply can’t help worrying that you are in far more debt than you could conceivably repay your creditors and may meet the same fate as those who work the fields for you. Do you check your books everyday?” 

“Mr. Clay does.”

“You and he believe your accountant is an honest man?”

“You would have me believe that you are?”

“I enjoy having a big, fat cock inside of me from time to time.”

Farrowgate choked on a cough. Oglethorpe winced then loudly sighed. 

Thomas looked wistfully out the window in a bit of theatre. “Sadly, it has been a long, _looong_ —”

“Yes, well, we probably don’t have to elaborate further on this point about honesty.”

“Mr. Oglethorpe, if any progress is to be made, honesty about the situation at hand is critical. It is unfortunate though that no one will address the persistent causes of poverty with any honesty so long as there are those who believe they can benefit from the criminalization of being poor.”

 _Five weeks on the ocean!_ And not single pirate ship sighting. For a second, Thomas’s mind drifted in the open ocean.

“This is a refuge for those who would otherwise be living in extreme privation back in England right now or indefinitely imprisoned until their debts are repaid, an impossible task for many families. Here, they work until they have satisfactorily met the obligations of their indentures, and then they are free men.”

“I may be mistaken, but I believe you meant to say, their sentences.”

“Contracts, not sentences.”

The windows were wide open, but the room was stifling. Sweat beaded along Oglethorpe’s wig line. Thomas’s forehead itched for him.

“Hm. Contracts can be renegotiated, yes?”

“The terms were already agreed to by both parties.”

“If one party has no recourse, is that true consent?”

“Doesn’t matter if they sign.”

“Many of them were lettered? Enough to read what they were signing? To know they’ve agreed to seven years’ hard labor and imprisonment for — for chicken theft?” 

“Renegotiation cannot happen if one party cannot offer better terms that both can agree to.”

The fly bounded along the rim of Oglethorpe’s teacup. _Bloody flies_.

“You plan to cultivate only sugarcane.”

“Sugarcane is a very lucrative crop.”

“But not here.”

Oglethorpe sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his chest. He smiled again.

“You think the word of a man who has never had to work for a single ha’penny in his life should have any bearing on how I run this operation?”

“Dear god, I hope you are not saying that you do not take the words of the trustees into advisement.”

“We know to whom I am referring.”

“May I suggest instead of regarding the men here as chattel, you regard them as men? Speak to them as you do with me? As you can imagine — or maybe you can’t, I shouldn’t presume to know the capacity of your imagination — they have plenty to say.”

“Even if I had that sort of time, what do you think that would that accomplish?”

Thomas looked at the stick on the desk. He considered its place of prominence. He considered the canned speech Oglethorpe recited upon their introduction.

“You call yourself a reform-minded man. A man who has chosen to be our custodian. A truly admirable thing — have I not said? Why do you not apply that characterization to your practice instead of running yet another penal colony?”

“It is easy to criticize when you are not being held accountable for the interests of your investors.”

“If I can propose better terms, would you be open to renegotiating?”

“What? You want to negotiate on behalf of all the labo— “

“Prisoners.”

Oglethorpe shook his head, chuckling. “Your arrogance is truly breathtaking. The men have elected you to be their advocate? Yes. I did not think so. Do not get ahead of yourself, Mr. Milton.”

“Well, I will speak to them.”

Thomas scratched his forehead. Reason asked what could this possibly bring about except more humiliation, more misery, more pain. He sensed that he had scratched too deeply and broken the skin.

“You’re welcome to speak to every man jack of them! But I have every intention of recouping my losses.”

“So you admit you are in debt.”

“Mr. Oglethorpe —“ Farrowgate interrupted.

Oglethorpe curtly dismissed him with a flap of the hand.

“Now, there are men here, including myself, who are not indebted to you.”

“Yes. You are here under special circumstances.”

“Since I was brought here against my will, I have no contract, have agreed to nothing. So I have to ask what are your intentions with me. Benevolent ones undoubtedly.”

Oglethorpe shrugged and waved the fly away from his face. “I’m afraid in your case it is not up to me decide what they are.”

He was gloating. Thomas knew the other prisoners of status were afforded special privileges and protection by their families, but he had not been.

“I heard that Mr. Bainbridge will live.”

“I heard as well.”

He blinked, and there they were, sinking into the murk of the Atlantic. He blinked the vision back into the darkness, but loneliness, a constant on the periphery, crept in a little closer. 

“My labor,” he blurted. “My labor must count for something. Can it be counted as his? So that he won’t be transferred to a debtors’ prison?”

“And who would assist him here? We are not nursemaids.”

“I…” _Stop_. “I could.” 

Oglethorpe scrutinized Thomas with transparent skepticism. “You?”

“Yes,” Thomas answered with more surety.

“Unbelievable. Even if I choose to consider this, I am under no obligation to address the matter in any way other than the one I deem appropriate.” He made a show of sorting through the mess of documents on his desk. “And now I have actual business to tend to.”

“I have told many of the men here of my relationship with Pe—“ Thomas inhaled. “Peter Ashe, Lord Governor of the Carolina colony. Unless you confine everyone here _ad infinitum_ , should anything happen to me, an accident God forbid, he will be alerted, and he will alert my father, who is not a charitable man. Regardless of his sentiments towards me, he would still seek more recompense than you could possibly afford, and I would hate for him to pursue such a reprisal against you. Because of the precariousness of your financial situation of course.”

His insides shifted disconcertingly. What would they think if they heard him tell such a flagrant, desperate lie? 

“As it appears, I am of the few profitable commodities you have here, Mr. Oglethorpe.”

A guard stepped inside, indicating his allotted time was up. Thomas left without a word and rushed towards the front doors.

Outside, he released the breath he was holding in. 

He leaned against a column and slid down to the floor. He told himself there was something here. There had to be. His enfeebled heart resisted calling it possibility, and decades of voices called him a fool. 

He got back to his feet and brushed himself off. The scratch on his forehead stung from the salt in his sweat.

He looked out at the northern fields and the front gates. He could hear the squeal and grind of the iron hinges as they opened, and the squeal and grind as they closed behind him. With the ache of the next day already quite real, it wouldn’t be enough to imagine the other side of them.

He kicked a rock off the veranda.

“ _Shit_.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jesusballs i thought this chapter was gonna kill this wip. fighting me like a frigging mongoose on pcp. but as w.h. auden once said, "fuck it just publish it" (or something like that).


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things get kinkier + t.ham navigating plantation life
> 
> (aiguuuu this chapter is way too long)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATED TAGS (tags actually matter for this chapter)
> 
> even for me this is really overdone and heavy-handed but hey i'm not sorry!  
> *moonwalks out of room, down the hall, and out the front door*
> 
> i will apologize for the chair thing, this detail i had to really be, like, fuck it, because i couldn't think of a more sensible substitute.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ........
> 
>  

“Who is it?”

“It is I.”

“‘It is I’? Your presumption that I would know who you are could be construed as arrogance by less kind men, sir.”

Thomas furrowed his brow. The mercury of his temperature started to bob. Over the past few weeks, it had become quick to rise as he learned who his true allies were. Expending more air than he could take in, he appealed to those less susceptible to prevailing attitudes about “right” and “wrong”; argued and bargained with those who shielded themselves behind majority opinion. By day’s end, he would only have a few minutes with James and another few with Miranda after she had awoken him at his desk. Hardly the respite he needed with those he loved. Wiping the ink from his face, Miranda ordered him not to join her at the Sturridges’ the next evening.

Thomas stared at the peephole. It stared back. The anticipation along with the shut door evoked his earliest memory of trying to leave his room, of too small hands scrabbling at a too high knob. Even then his unformed brain sensed that if he stepped over the threshold, he would be free.

“Have you been struck dumb on my doorstep and can no longer state who you are? Or do you not know who you are to say?”

“I am Lord Tho—“

“No.”

“The Viscou—“

“No.”

“I…I —”

“You stutter too?”

“I am the eldest son of —“

“ _No._ ” 

Laughter.

“Right.” Thomas cleared his throat. “I am…yours. _Lieutenant_.” 

The door opened. Thomas sidled in and tossed his hat and folio of documents onto the window sill. He sat on the bed and lifted his foot to inspect the worn heel of his shoe.

“I’ve gone lopsided from pacing in circles!”

He laughed to himself as he removed both shoes. He kicked them under the bed then pushed off of it, all but lunging at James. With their arms wound tightly around each other, he began to drift in the comfort of their wholeness. But before sentimentality could change the evening’s tenor, Thomas stepped back and took in the reliably splendid sight of James in his uniform. Where his eyes landed, his fingertips danced. His cheek, his chin, his chest. They skipped along his belt and down the dirk that hung from it, and over the hands that wore the gloves he had gifted him.

“Thomas?”

“My composure may not be as unflappable as the impression I give it.”

“Hm. One could never tell.”

James removed Thomas’s wig and placed it on the sea chest at the foot of the bed.

“Since the old man will never cede his seat to me, I can’t do much more than wring my hands. I know I have not had much to fail at, a life of study and charity work, but this time I truly fear failure.”

“Failure? Your family’s wealth and titles are not in danger, are they? You can always try again.”

Thomas smirked. “Of course.”

He knew James was being facetious but pointedly so, a little acid to strip the gilding off his cage. It was true though. Immune to the consequences of failure, he would be afforded more chances to “try again,” not like most people, people like James, unless the world became a kinder one. Thomas took a deep breath. So the world would have to change. 

“When I walked past Hedges’s office, I overheard him say, ‘His own father, has he no decency?’”

Thomas sighed. He shrugged off his coat. “I am only my father’s son to these men.”

“Well, fuck those men.”

These were not facetious words.

Few ever stood steadfastly by him and Miranda that James’s instinct to defend them was still a strange addition to their lives. They had wondered together how much strength one man could possess. To fight like he did, all of his life, and, armed and armored, for them at the risk of losing everything. What hell it must be to have no earthly means with which he could give all of it. Thomas felt foolish now for entertaining fear while in the safety of him.

“Yes. Fuck them,” he murmured into James’s mouth before crushing it in a kiss.

James released Thomas’s lower lip from his teeth. He walked to the other side of the room as he untied the scabbard from his belt. Covered in leather with a minimal chape and hanger, it was simpler and shorter than the one that encased his sword. He sat down in the only chair, a heavy, black armless thing, and laid it across his lap. Even seated James adopted the stance of a man at sea. With his feet flat on the ground and his knees set excessively apart, his breeches were pulled taut over his thighs and conformed to them like a second skin. Thomas could see the soft outline of his genitals, and all the frenetic lines of thought immediately converged on one.

“Take off your clothes.”

Thomas nodded. To play his part, he thought to perform his undressing, but at the sight of James’s tongue unsealing his lips, he might have lost a button or two. 

James gestured to the floor with his chin. Thomas lowered himself onto his knees. With a crook of his finger, he beckoned him. Thomas placed his hands on the carpet and trained his eyes forward. Slowly, slinking, he crawled to him. When he reached James’s feet, he sat back on his heels and looked up at him with rapt attention. James reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a swath of white cambric. A cravat. The scalloped-lace one.

_Oh…Miranda._

James circled his head twice with it then enclosed the knot he made in his fist. He pressed, guiding Thomas forward. The amber haze darkened as his face closed in on the junction of James’s crotch. He nuzzled the growing firmness that lay there, licked and mouthed it greedily while his hands smoothed James’s thighs, his thumbs tracing inseams, then James’s calves, his palms stroking leather.

James gently peeled him away and rose from the chair. Far from done with him, Thomas rose too, but a tap on the shoulder affixed him to his place. Listening intently, he shaped his mind in imitation of the room and watched James inside of it. Five steps to the dresser. The top drawer. One more step to the left. Six steps back to the chair.

It had been years since Thomas partook in a similar arrangement, but he was quickly reminded of how intensely one responded to stimuli under such circumstances. James arranged Thomas’s forearms on the seat as he dryly explained how to tie a taut line hitch knot. As much as Thomas wanted to know about that life, knots included, the friction of the satin ribbons against the sensitive undersides of his wrists allowed for very little learning. He breathed unevenly into the still warm seat while the ribbons were secured to the stiles of the chair. 

Like a groom appraising an animal, James ran a gloved hand down Thomas’s back and over his haunch. Another sensation, kid leather on skin, to add to his bank of pleasures. The hand turned and slid up his inner thigh. He shivered when the seam along the fingertip grazed his hole.

“Can you maintain that position?”

“…Yes.”

A prolonged silence followed. Thomas swiveled his wrists, draped his arms over the sides of the chair then returned them to their previous place. His thighs began to tremble. His elbows strained to be straightened. His skin crawled with increasingly maddening discomfort. 

“ _James_ ,” he cried out, making no effort to stifle the desire attempting to escape him like pent-up steam.

The floorboards creaked underfoot. His heart pounded. Hands came up beneath his hips and brought him to his feet. All of his being tried to leap from the confines of his body into his touch when the flat of the scabbard struck him. Thomas yelped in surprise.

“If you keep pulling, this will end unsatisfactorily.”

“I will stop.” Thomas gripped the sides of the seat and shifted his weight onto it.

“Good.” James kneaded the spot where contact was made, coaxing out a watery moan. “When you presented me these gloves, the appropriate thing for an officer to have done was refuse them. But out of weakness, I accepted them so that I would have something to remember you by after the assignment ended, and I had been discarded.”

“‘Discarded’?”

He hissed. Another corrective.

“Even if they weren’t as fine as they are, I would still treasure them. But wearing them while I am in uniform would be in violation of the officer’s code of conduct. And that cannot be tolerated.”

He heard the fleshy slap of the gloves tossed onto the side table.

“The primacy of order in the Navy is never in question. It is upheld by discipline that is swift, severe, and uncompromising. And yet there are always those who challenge it. By swearing, drinking, stealing, wasting provisions, falling asleep on watch. Any tendency towards insolence or general unruliness needs to be killed in its cot. What happens to a young shipman who has committed an offense?”

“He is flogged.”

“No.”

“He is caned.”

“Correct. He is caned. The crew is made to gather on deck before the offender is marched out. His transgression is detailed by the boatswain who then asks if he will take this opportunity to plead for leniency. He staunchly refuses. So his punishment is declared. Up to twelve strokes depending on the disposition of the commanding officer. He will receive all twelve. The boatswain orders him to lie upon a cannon to which he is lashed, and his trousers are pulled down, baring his arse.”

Thomas curled his fingers into the wood.

“Are you listening? This isn’t going to —”

“ _I’m listening._ ”

Thomas braced himself, expectant, feet balanced on the edge of a precipice, but it did not come. Purposely left wanting, he ached to rut against the air and show James what he did to him and what he was giving him to take.

“The boatswain’s shadow falls on him. It has a weight, the kind authority like that has. Authority that comes with rank and respect. The young shipman has neither. He only has his pride, the worst sin of all.”

Thomas bristled as he always did at the talk of sin. His own had led him to James, to this room. Taught him that all were deserving of a chance at being loved. If there ever was a thing to be proud of, it was that. His was not a defect or moral failing, but rather why so many would deny themselves and others similar happiness.

“The officers believe his pride can be sublimated into obedience through pain and humiliation. But when the weight of authority presses down on one place, nature has a way of rising up in another, more salient than before.” James rested his hand on Thomas’s nape. “So one must choose to be obedient.”

He dragged the palm of his other hand along the underside of Thomas’s cock. As he withdrew, his hips bucked forward to chase it. Another corrective, harder this time, redirecting his want to the place of impact.

“The first stroke bolsters his arrogance. He believes he can withstand this. The second and third come in quick succession. Pain burgeons. His body seizes fearfully as he awaits the next stroke. He can’t turn his head to see, but he can hear the boatswain pacing the deck. He tries to count the seconds, but the boatswain sets the time. The next stroke lands. He can’t help but cry out. His pride, a searing pain across his arse, is now all there is. There are no eyes on him anymore. There is no boatswain and his rattan.”

James’s voice, in sharp contrast to his tale, was unfailingly steady and calm. Lulling and low. It submerged Thomas in its bath-like warmth, the war over his spirits between weariness and restlessness pacified, the threats and accusations quieted.

Disgrace. Apostasy. Treason.

_Has he no decency?_

As James continued, his body gradually dissipated, starting with his feet and then his legs, then inching up the line of his spine until there was just his exhalations, shallow and hot, on his upper lip.

“The boatswain resumes pacing. His footfalls are heavy. They regulate his breathing, they regulate his heartbeat. He finds himself thankful for this, because he himself cannot do it. He is thankful that he is bound to the cannon, because he is shaking now. Shaking as if in the throes of death. His whole body dying for it. The final stroke.”

The chair screeched against the floor. When Thomas’s mind reached the end of its tether, it snapped back into his body. He gasped, gulped wildly for air. As the sting melted into a muted spreading heat, he melted with it.

James began to pace as the boatswain did, drawing out the moments in varying lengths. His voice, now chastising and soothing in turns, retreated to the edges of Thomas’s hearing but would not fall away. Whatever his words were, as they were mostly sounds now, the message they conveyed was unchanging: he was there. He always would be.

As subsequent stings bloomed, brightly prickling the surface, pain reached into his muscles in pulses and waves. His brain sparked white behind his eyes as nerve endings fired in all directions. His lips, moving of their own accord, dribbled silent pleas of _please_ after _please_. _Please stop. Please don’t stop. Oh god._ But no thought mattered as he was carved away and cut free from all of them. What remained of him would be for James, and only James, to refine into something precious and small. Small enough to be placed in the palm of his hand, brought to his mouth, and swallowed.

A soft keen emanated from the center of Thomas’s head. It floated in the air like a filament of silk. A heavy light cocooned his senses, and he started to separate — from the space around him, his body from his mind, his mind from itself.

James dragged the scabbard’s chape across his backside, bringing him back from the brink. The scrape of the soldered edge drew a blazing cold line on his smoldering skin. He contracted once more into a tight quiver for a blow that never came before finally falling apart. He sank to his knees and sagged against the chair, blissfully drained.

“After punishment has been dealt to completion, he is cut loose. He wishes to lie upon the deck but does not want to appear weak. He gives himself no choice but to get up. He gets up. He sees the boatswain through his tears. He thanks him although he wants nothing more than to turn the rattan upon him and all who watched. But instead he —”

Thomas raised a knee.

“Instead he takes this pain away from them and makes it his.”

Then the other.

James unbound him then removed the cravat. Standing on wobbly legs, he exploded in a fiery tingling and crumpled in James’s embrace. James laid him on the bed and dotingly kissed and rubbed his wrists. Thomas could have wept if he ever thought he’d be denied such gentleness.

He listened the welcome sound of James removing his clothes, the shuffle of wool and linen. James positioned himself over his legs and spread him open with hands that were like branding irons. Thomas tensed at the hot puff of his breath before yielding to the slow drag of his tongue. James lined his wet cleft with his cock and shifted it tentatively between his buttocks. Thomas considered letting him continue like this, since there was pleasure to be had this way too, but…

“Are you…going to fuck me?” he asked into the pillow.

James’s laugh was like a breath held for too long. He reached over to open the side table drawer.

Thomas gingerly turned onto his back and, spellbound, watched James’s oiled fist ride up and down the shaft of his cock, the candlelight playing off its glistening facets. James pushed his knees back and propped him up between his thighs. At the new onrush of sensations, Thomas’s head lolled back. The countless needle pricks of hair, the stretch of his inflamed skin and of the fingers inside him. He groaned gutturally when they were withdrawn, eager to be filled again. James’s mouth fell agape when Thomas, so pleasingly pliant, opened up easily around him.

“Feel it,” he whispered into his ear. “Feel where we are joined.”

He guided Thomas’s hand down between them. Thomas haltingly, wondrously traced the delicate skin where it met slick hardness. He opened his fingers to catch it between them as James started to undulate into him.

“Mmm…J…James…har… _harder_.”

James paused. Thomas saw the concern in his eyes — was it possible to find him more endearing? — and chuckled at the utter incongruity of it. Put at ease, the corner of his mouth turned up, James responded with more enthusiasm. With the ceaseless slide of him through his fingers and into his body, and the collisions between his tender flesh and the juts of hips, the pleasure their bodies produced together was sometimes more than Thomas could comprehend.

As James neared release, he gripped his waist and began fucking him artlessly. His hair came free with the force of his thrusts. Sweat plastered tresses to his flushed, glowing skin. The sounds he made and his face as he came would undoubtedly deprive Thomas of his sobriety for days to come. If only he could drink this and be drunk on him forever.

Thoroughly spent, James panted love’s nonsense into Thomas’s shoulder. Exhaustion robbed Thomas of even the simplest words, and all he could say was James’s name, but his name quite conveniently said everything for him.

James rolled them over so that Thomas lay on top of him.

“ _God_ , you’re heavy,” he grunted as he wrapped his limbs possessively around him. 

Thomas settled his head on James’s chest, and his leaden eyelids slid shut. Cradled by the heat of his body, he could almost forget the skin that separated them. Certainly, being in love did feel like losing oneself but held in James’s arms and molded to him, he recognized his own shape. It was a new one, a better one. Whoever he was to those out there — a wayward son, an impotent cuckold, a madman — he knew that he was _his_.

In the morning, James briefed him on his discussions with Hennessey and Handasyde’s deputy while they rifled through Thomas’s documents, making revisions on some and tearing up others. After he scoured the floor for Thomas’s buttons, James hastily sewed them back onto his breeches.

They left together in a hack, skipping a first repast, for a particularly rough ride to Whitehall. Thomas had a full schedule of meetings interspersed with more informal ones at Waghorn’s. He was desperate to get through them all so that he could see Miranda and kiss that wicked woman. It was going to be another terribly long day but another step forward.

He and James parted at the steps where they first met. They had kissed in the coach then shook hands on the road, unable to resist another touch. Thomas wasn’t sure if they could rejoin that night, but, in his absence, with every bump in the road and brush of his clothes, the throbbing soreness sang so brilliantly to him of James.

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas tugged his blanket closed around his shoulders as he slipped out of bed. For months, the heat stole his sleep, and now the cold did. It was a winter the summer did not hint was coming. 

Snow had fallen through the night and built up into flawless mounds and drifts. It deadened all sound and softened all the edges. Thomas looked around in wonder, not having seen snow like this since he lived in Ashbourne. He ran his fingers through it and drew shapes in it. He matched tracks to the animals that would have left them. When the sun was high enough above the horizon, he headed to the great house in need of a shovel to break up the ice in the well. He walked down the plantation’s main thoroughfare, a wide road that split at the ancient live oak tree. In the dawning light, what wasn’t trimmed in white was a fathomless black. Majestic and monstrous, it sat behind the house like its stalwart protector.

He rounded the tree and walked past the hothouse and the kitchen garden. As he turned the corner to the front of the house, he noticed that the gates were open with Farrowgate standing between them. Thomas was too far to tell if he was seeing someone off, or, as history strongly suggested, seeing someone in. Farrowgate stepped aside to let a pair of guards through. The man between them was taller and broader than either but perfectly acquiescent. As they neared the house, Thomas saw that he was shackled as he had been.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

“Mr. Halberstam. When you are freed from this place, what is the first thing you will do?”

“Whores.”

“Whores. Ah. Yes. You and many of your colleagues are of the same mind on that question. All the more reason to try to secure you pay.”

Thomas picked up a stick. Halberstam watched him with enormous curiosity as he wrote in the snow with it.

“The first letter?”

Halberstam tilted his head and sucked his teeth.

“Is that a ‘w’?”

“And the next one?”

“‘H,’ is it? Oh, well, I know that’s an ‘o.’”

After Kilmead and Aberfeld lost fingers to the frost, Thomas asked Farrowgate to let them congregate in the mess by the stoves. Oglethorpe forbade large groups from assembling beyond the fields and mealtimes but was predictably unwilling to spend more resources on medical care. An easy get, but as a precaution, armed guards were posted at the doors.

Halberstam opened Thomas’s book and stared at it, bewildered by the foreign characters that loped across the pages. Thomas pointed out Ariadne’s name and told him the story of how, after falling in love with Theseus, she helped him defeat the minotaur and find his way out of the labyrinth.

“On their way to Athens, their ship was caught in a storm, which made a pregnant Ariadne too ill to sail. She was left on an island to recover, only to be told later that Theseus was lost in the storm. It was also written that Theseus abandoned Ariadne, because Dionysus told him in a dream that he was not meant to have her. Some stories say that she hanged herself out of grief. Some say that Theseus returned and took her away. Others that Dionysus, after finding her on the island, married her. There is even a version where there are two Ariadnes.”

“So which is it?”

“Which is it?”

“Yeah. Which is the real story?”

“Well…none. Or all.”

Halberstam handed the book back. “I guess I’ll pick the one with the ending I like best.”

“Excellent idea.”

Thomas spotted Bainbridge and gestured to the space beside him.

The man he squeezed past snorted. “Who’d you think you are coming in here? This — this is for men who work. Probably more because of you.”

Bainbridge sat down and focused on the fire. Thomas turned towards the man, an argument already fully formed on his tongue, but heard Bainbridge mutter under his breath, “Don’t.”

“Oh! Why don’t you, our Lord Tom O’Bedlam, drudge for all of us? ‘Bout time someone like you did the shit work for us as we’ve done for men like you.”

A few grumbled approvingly. Whether he even was a lord or simply putting on airs was still up for debate, but his identification as a bedlamite had been readily accepted.

Thomas squared his shoulders again to speak, but Bainbridge was firmer.

“ _Don’t._ ”

Not having much to work with, all of Thomas’s attempts to lift him out of his despair had failed. Bainbridge would shake his head and laugh sardonically at his Marcus Whomeverus nonsense. After he was moved to a structure by the stables, he withdrew even further. He haunted the plantation, appearing only on the periphery before disappearing into the dolor of winter. 

Thomas nearly dropped the bucket of water he brought him.

“But why? She lives. You live. Why will you not join her when you have the chance to? If I was her, if I loved someone, I would want him by my side, whole or not. Never — _never_ — to be parted again.”

“If I should die here, then she could marry an able man without guilt or shame.”

“Then…then we will figure out how you can earn after you leave this wretched place.”

Another shake of the head. Another sardonic laugh. “You really are mad.”

Thomas pulled the blanket more tightly around his shoulders. The grounds were silent save the odd guard shuffling down the path, eager to return indoors. Smoke billowed from the great house’s chimneys even when Oglethorpe was not in residence. He refused to think of what comforts might lay inside. He refused to think of down beds, crackling fires, fur throws…

“Cold, cold, cold,” he muttered to himself.

Outside of the scullery window, there was a small burlap satchel half buried in the snow. Inside was what could be spared by the kitchen maids for Bainbridge. He tucked it into his coat pocket and headed towards the stables. As he passed the wash house, he stepped squarely into the path another prisoner who was exiting the building. They recoiled away from each other and stammered overlapping apologies.

After getting a better look at the man, Thomas froze as though he had spotted a rare bird in the wild. He supposed he had. The other prisoner was clean shaven and wore a heavy woolen great coat over his work clothes, a more substantial garment than the one Thomas wore. His hands were chapped and his face steam-burned, so he could not be this Whosit fellow the other prisoners have mentioned in passing.

“You —“ Thomas stepped in front of him as the other man turned in the other direction. “Can you —“

He refused to acknowledge Thomas as if by doing so he would somehow not be seen.

“Do you —“ 

The man turned again, and Thomas raced to cut him off. They continued like this, in a ridiculous _pas de deux_.

“Stop and look at me for Christ’s sake!”

This effectively halted his evasive maneuvering. He glared at Thomas. His expression was one of indignation that anyone should talk to him in that manner, one that Thomas was very familiar with. The man opened his mouth to speak then clamped it shut. He pivoted once more and stalked away in long strides.

In a final bid for attention, Thomas shouted, “My father is Lord Alfred Hamilton, the Earl of Ashbourne!”

There was a hitch in his gait upon hearing the name, but he resolutely jogged on. Thomas huffed loudly, his white breath giving form to his frustration. These men, if they had access to resources he could utilize, any contact outside of these walls, refused to offer Thomas more than accidental eye contact from afar.

“Damn it all,” he muttered as he sat down next to Metternich in the mess.

He emptied his pocket of dried stalks of agrimony and yarrow. Metternich picked a few up and twirled them between his fingers.

“They’re for Bainbridge.”

“Ah, sweet on him now, are you?”

“For his arm. I learned about these from our groundskee— Something I learned when I lived in Derbyshire.”

“So how is, er…” Metternich waved the flowers at the room. “That well, eh?”

He cackled and handed Thomas a hardboiled egg.

“That’s what you get, you meddling fuck.”

Thomas sighed deeply. “They understand intrinsically how helping Bainbridge benefits all of us too, but…they want tangible, immediate results for themselves that are simply not practicable. Anything short of that has not exactly been engendering full-throated support.”

“Look, you’re used to everyone listening to you, when no one’s listened to us. Considering how many are still willing to talk to you means they don’t believe you’re completely full of shit. That’s a bloody achievement I’d say!”

Metternich thumped his encouragement on Thomas’s back, sending him into the table and the egg across it.

“Thank you, Walter,” he said after he reclaimed his breath and egg. “However much they despise this place, they have been made to believe that this is the best outcome they could possibly expect for themselves and should not demand better. If we can get even one concession from Oglethorpe, then we can get more. Once we do, he will not be able to renege on any of them without creating a clear common enemy of himself.”

“What I can’t help wondering is, sure, you speak Oglethorpe’s language, but what do you expect from a deal with the devil? A fair one?

“Oglethorpe is no devil. Do not give him more dominion over you than you would want him to have. He seeks power, but he is neither clever nor ruthless enough to aim for more than what is within arm’s reach.”

“But any man seeking power has got to have something of the devil in him, and what’s to stop the devil once he’s got a little power?”

“Power is no constant. History has shown us this time and time again.”

By February, the thaw came, and everything dripped. The plantation sank into a morass of mud. The ratoons were rotting in the northern fields, and the men’s toes were rotting off their feet. The branches of the oak tree broke out in a rash of pale green buds.

Thomas lay in his bed, listening to the _plink plink plink_ of water dripping off the overhang.

There was the occasional scrape of canvas amidst the animal snores but no indication of consciousness, so Thomas resorted to what he did when he was young, and sleeplessness plagued him. He lay on his stomach and pushed his hand down his trousers. He grew hard from his touch alone, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t Geoffrey. He needed desire’s flames to lick at his heart.

Naturally he thought of James, but to put him into service like this made him wilt with distaste. He thought of Oswyn and Wintersloe and Keswick. Even Archibald and the third Viscount of Hattesbury who wanted only to suck on Thomas’s toe while he pleasured himself. But like paintings exposed to too much sun, their colors were dim and their lines faded.

Spencer, the latest comer, had taken Bainbridge’s old bed. His blanket had slipped to the floor and hung off his knee. The moonlight cast him in grey stone, a classical figure in repose. Thomas followed the line of his open collar over his clavicle to his well-muscled chest, which rose and fell in a private show for him. He imagined slipping his hand beneath his shirt and laying it flat on his breast, imagined the beat of his heart couched in its heat. 

Spencer shifted and threw an arm over his head. The motion tugged his sleeve down to his elbow, revealing raised patches of skin, blisters that were picked open too soon, and the ladder rungs of nicks where blood had been drawn. Thomas pulled his hand out.

_Plink._

He went outside and kicked away the tin cup the drip played its tune on. On the way back to his bed, he draped the blanket over Spencer’s body.

During the weeks since he arrived, he didn’t speak a word and was deaf to all attempts at banter. Although young and strong, he was ordered to weed by hand. A hand that never wielded a tool. His hard silence, that mile-long stare, and the close watch of the guards on him — the other prisoners concluded it was best to ignore him.

When the season turned dry, the ass-end of winter before the spring rains came, Thomas was able to climb to the roof of the barrack again. The moon waxed, and the leaves hushed. The earth was still too cool for the insects to emerge.

The barrack door groaned open. Spencer was walking in his sleep.

_Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles._

What could his have been?

In the field, he turned away from Thomas. His arms were caked with dirt up to his elbows. He worked hard and didn’t seem to tire, but he now stood stock-still, staring at the outcropping of rocks nearby. One paused his labor at his own risk, but Tunstaple left Spencer be.

Thomas wondered why Farrowgate paired them, the two graduates of bedlam. If it amused him. He drove the shovel into the dirt. If Farrowgate could be amused. When he pushed down on the blade’s step, his back twinged. The shovel fell from his hands. He bent to pick it up and was suddenly pushed off his footing.

“Bloody —“

He spun around mid-stumble. Spencer, with his eyes to the ground, gripped the handle of the shovel with both hands. Inches from Thomas’s feet was the severed head of a snake. Its body slithered on the other side of the blade, drawing lazy arcs in the upturned dirt. He handed the shovel back to Thomas.

Tunstaple fired a warning whistle. He strode over with his hands on his gun. Spencer’s brow lowered, darkening his eyes.

“You two. What’s going on?”

Thomas gestured to the decapitated snake. “An unwanted visitor.”

Tunstaple peered down at the ground.

“Nasty fuckers. Must be a den in some rat hole,” he muttered, glancing at the rocks. He kicked the head away before returning to the perimeter.

“Spencer, thank you.”

He stared wordlessly at Thomas. Or rather through him. He blinked, ending the moment, and returned to pulling up the dead ratoons.

It was late, long past midnight Thomas guessed. His back was no better. If he were to cry now, he wished it would have been for more colorful reasons than this. He draped himself backwards over the rock he sat on, hoping the curve and cold would alleviate it. Upside down, Spencer came into view. He sprang up in shock, almost blacking out from the pain. Spencer held Thomas upright by the shoulder. He was awake. Thomas jerked away from his touch.

“Do you always come out here while everyone sleeps?”

Thomas was struck by his voice. It was achingly young.

“Sometimes. To be alone. To have a little peace.” To remember himself.

Spencer sat unbidden next to him. “They said I brought the devil back with me from France, and I have not known peace since.”

“You were a soldier.”

He looked up at the sky.

“You walk in your sleep.”

“Will they bind me to my bed?”

“I do not believe so.”

“And if I hurt someone?”

“The consequences are different here.”

“I see things. Smell them too. Like I’m still there.”

On many nights, the half-barren field of sugarcane became “there,” the battlefield of Malplaquet. Spencer told Thomas of those things. Steam rising from fresh gut wounds. Blood and dirt commingling minerals. Mud seeping into the open rictuses of the fallen. He held Thomas’s hand as he sobbed freely. Thomas thought he would break his fingers. He rested his head on Thomas’s lap when he struggled to sleep. Thomas never asked what it was that he did.

“This place… It’s like an open grave.”

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas leaned against a post, humming woefully off-key a song Millicent used to sing. A small wound in his leg, where a billhook clipped him, strummed his nerves in accompaniment.

He looked out at the northwestern field. Spencer sat in the middle of it, doing…who knew what. The whole lot had to be cleared after none of the ratoons were deemed worth saving, while the southern fields showed meager growth. The smell of damp earth permeated his head cavities.

To compensate for his losses, Oglethorpe took in more prisoners for pennies, fit more men to a room, and pinched portions. Fat and muscle dwindled. Angles became sharper and tempers more frayed. There were more fights and more reprisals. More and more able-bodied men sent up north, their indentures bought by less high-minded owners of tobacco plantations. There were no apples for the carthorses, and guns were carried with regularity. The doors to the house were guarded at all times, and the meetings with Farrowgate ceased. If Oglethorpe’s venture collapsed, they wondered what other sectors of hell they would all be sent to.

Buxton whistled at Thomas as he came down the road. Thomas shoved off the post and limped back towards the field. Buxton whistled again and gestured for him to come his way. When Thomas stepped onto the road, he pointed to the shovel in his hand. He tossed it onto the ground. He looked over at Spencer who watched them.

Thomas followed him to the house, where Oglethorpe stood out front. Beside him, Farrowgate was vigorously stamping and dragging his foot across the dirt. The reason for his exertions had been etched deeply enough into the ground that Thomas could still read it when he reached them.

_whores_

He coughed away an incipient laugh.

“Ah, Mr. Milton.”

Oglethorpe’s unctuous tone instantly set him on edge.

“Your consternation is not warranted, I assure you. If you follow Mr. Farrowgate, you will see that for yourself.”

He eyed them both with naked suspicion.

“All right you!” Buxton barked.

Farrowgate cleared his throat, stopping short his advance on Thomas. “Please return to your post, Mr. Buxton.”

He huffed loudly then turned back onto the road.

Thomas trailed Farrowgate as they marched through the southern fields and past the mill, the wash house, the stables, and the barn. At the edge of a forest, where the men hid run-off from the mill, was a cluster of small cabins. Laundry dried on lines. Crudely whittled pins lay in the dirt, but Thomas saw no ball. Farrowgate led him to a cabin that was covered in honeysuckle vines and opened the door.

They entered a room with a small stove and a table bracketed by benches. A plain sideboard displayed a cast-iron kettle and small stoneware jars in various sizes. Bundles of dried plants hung from string along the wall. In the corner was a small writing desk with two books: a Bible and unfortunately _The Pilgrim’s Progress_. Thomas hesitantly opened its drawer. Inside were paper and ink. He brought a hand to his mouth in disbelief at their proximity to him. 

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll be boarding here from now on.”

“Pardon?”

Farrowgate headed towards the corridor, pushing past a perplexed Thomas. He opened a door to a bedroom and stepped back to allow Thomas inside. There were two beds, real beds, a chest of drawers, and two washstands, each with a mirror hung over it.

Thomas couldn’t resist looking into one of the mirrors since he had not only been hidden from the world but from himself. Of course the man he saw was not the one he last saw years ago. This one was harder and older. Much older. But unlike him, Thomas was not made of glass.

In the reflection, he caught Farrowgate looking at him.

“I know I am speaking out of turn, but I was informed you were a prisoner here.”

His mouth became a rigid line.

“Mr. Bainbridge told you this.”

“This is to gain my favor, is it? So that I might assist Mr. Oglethorpe? Or does it mitigate your guilt in some way?”

“Once I accepted my lot, guilt ceased to afflict me.”

“When you were released from your indenture, didn’t your future look different then?”

“I was only released to work directly for Mr. Oglethorpe. You should consider…” Farrowgate glanced away. “You should consider the possibility of the same for you.”

Thomas swallowed a bitter-tasting rejoinder and shook his head.

“My name is Hamilton. Not Milton. Mr. Oglethorpe must know this.”

“I am not aware of the knowledge he possesses about you.”

“You’re not curious?”

“Curiosity is not a requisite of the job.”

“So you would not tell me about this Lord…Whosit.”

“Who—? You’re having a laugh.”

“No. He’s a prominent nobleman they say is imprisoned here. I would… I want to ensure that we all address him properly should we cross paths, but no one knows his name. That is all.”

“One of the conditions of imprisonment for you and your sort is secrecy. Milton or Hamilton, it does not matter. And this Lord Whosit? I’ve no idea of whom you speak.” Farrowgate gestured to the door. “We’ve spent enough time here.”

Thomas followed him out of the cabin.

“Mr. Hamilton,” he called without turning. “Get your leg seen to. Do not return to the field until it is improved. I will notify the drivers of your absence from work.”

Farrowgate charged ahead, leaving Thomas behind.

He left the great house with a poultice of comfrey and honey bandaged to his leg just as the bell tolled for dinner. He could hear from all sides the chorale of exhaustion that usually followed. As he headed in the direction of the drove, Spencer snuck up behind him and gave his sleeve a yank.

“Spencer! You ought to wear a bell around your neck.”

“What did Piglet want?”

“I’m being moved out of the barracks. To one of the cabins on the far southern lot.”

“What?” His hand came around Thomas’s arm.

“Spencer, no.”

He withdrew it, bitten by his rebuke.

“You’ll be fine.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Leaving? If only I had known that I could leave.”

Thomas’s jest fell flat.

The air shifted, and Spencer was upon him, gripping his collar to the point of choking him. Thomas dug his heels into the dirt as he struggled to break his hold. His strength was frightening, more than he had imagined, and panic swelled in his chest. Looking into Spencer’s stricken eyes, he thought for the first time in his life that he could actually die.

He released Thomas with a shove. As he desperately sucked in air, Spencer struck him in the cheek.

The blow didn’t hurt as much as it surprised, and it surprised Spencer far more. He reeled backwards before turning and fleeing into the cane.

“Spencer!” His name was a spray of blood.

The stalks stopped swaying in his wake when he reached the other side of them. Running was pointless, but Thomas wished he could keep running. The guards mounted horses and rode off to corral him.

“Are you injured?” Farrowgate asked from behind.

“What will they do to him?”

“Spencer knows the rules. Assault is not tolerated here.”

“ _No_ , I am not injured.”

“That does not change the fact that he assaulted you.”

Thomas walked up to him. His hands curled and uncurled at his sides as if he could throttle his growing apprehension in his fists.

“For God’s sake, Farrowgate, be kind.”

“ _Milton_.” Thomas flinched. “Please do not forget your place.”

Thomas wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He hobbled off to the barrack, where he waited. For what, he didn’t know. He only knew what he hoped for. Hours passed, and he had fallen asleep. He awoke to Buxton standing over him, holding his book up like bait or a threat. He swallowed the blood that had pooled under his tongue and straightened his cuffs.

Candlelight illuminated one of the windows of his new lodging. Thomas trudged the last stretch, leg and cheek throbbing in tandem, and slowly opened the door.

“Tom!” Metternich cried with a hearty laugh.

Thomas exhaled loudly with relief and fell back against the door with all of his weight.

“Fuck if you aren’t looking like the wrong end of a choleric donkey.”

Thomas sat on the bench and nested his head in his folded arms. Metternich poured boiling water into a small bowl of crushed bee balm leaves and mint then set it by his elbow.

“Your Bainbridge, by the way…”

Thomas lifted his head. “Please. Give him time. He just needs time.” He dropped his head back down.

“When was the last time you’ve had a proper night’s sleep?”

“The 21st of December, 1705. One day I shall erect a great monument to it.”

“You know what you should do? Join me for service tomorrow. A little God may give you some peace of mind.”

Thomas peered up from his arms with a raised eyebrow.

“What? I’ll have you know I pray every damn day. For the days to go by faster so that I may see my wife soo— ah. Sorry.”

“Oh god, don’t apologize. A future to live for. Everyone should have one.”

“But who knows the future. Time isn’t kind to most men. She may run screaming when this appears on her doorstep.”

Metternich retrieved the Bible from the desk and set it between them. 

“If you want assurances, there’s always the word of the Lord,” he said with a wry chuckle.

Thomas ran his hand over the cover.

“Do you know of _sortes Virgilianae_?”

“What do you think?”

“It was a method of divination some ancient Romans practiced using _The Aeneid_. Supposedly Hadrian was an early adopter of it.”

Thomas imagined the book was his old copy of the epic. When his class was instructed to translate book IV, he petitioned to translate Homer instead and was roundly flogged for it. He simply found Aeneas to be a bit of a bore.

“Since our less than extensive library lacks the work of Virgil, this is probably a sufficient substitute.”

“What do you do then?”

“Open it to any page and point. And what has been indicated should speak of your future.”

Metternich narrowed his eyes. “This Hadrian. Was he a stupid man?”

“She was a very smart horse.”

“Well, of course she was. So. Go on then. Divine away. Let us see what the future holds for our Tom.”

Thomas closed his eyes and opened the book. 

He laid his finger on the page and read, “‘And all the congregation of them that were come again out of the captivity made booths, and sat under the booths: for since the days of Jeshua the son of Nun unto that day had not the children of Israel done so. And there was very great gladness.’”

Metternich leaned forward. “Well? What does it mean?”

“I…” Thomas scowled.

He shut the book. 

“Perhaps it’s broken.”

“The Bible?”

“It’s possible.”

“Tom!”

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Spencer’s return was heralded by no one. He reappeared one morning a mute specter in the corner having taken Thomas’s old bed. Their new work details had them on different schedules in different fields, so Thomas arranged for them to meet after dinner. Spencer sat on a stump and mindlessly picked at the carpet of white clover while Thomas recounted the time a bat tore around his cabin and other similarly inane anecdotes. During subsequent meetings, he struggled to mine his mind for more but little happened there that was worth telling, each day not much different from the previous one.

“Did I tell you about the first time I held a chicken?” Thomas asked.

Spencer laughed. He had never so much as tittered before. Thomas supposed it was not an inappropriate response to his question. He narrated how an excursion to San Miniato al Monte ended in an old peasant’s chicken coop. After he plucked the feathers from his wig, Spencer placed his hand on Thomas’s head and smiled. Before the story was over, he walked away, leaving a crown of weeds tangled in Thomas’s hair.

He headed back to the cabin, taking the long way to pass the stables and look in on Bainbridge.

When he entered his room, he started violently.

“Shit! God!” He clutched his lower back.

A young man was sitting on the other bed in his room, his spotted face contorted in a sneer.

“Thank you, father. I get to board with a filthy savage.”

It was obvious from the quality of his suit that he was no son of a sieve maker. Thomas took in the detailing along the cuffs and the contrasting color of the bound buttonholes, the finery making him uncomfortably nostalgic. His work clothes lay in an untouched pile beside him.

“My apologies. What is your name?”

“Henry Lewis Ballard. My father is Sir Robert Lewis Ballard,” he recited. “You’ve got rubbish on your head.”

Thomas knew the father’s name. It belonged to an undistinguished fellow who served briefly as a Privy Counsellor. He removed the flowers and extended his hand.

“I’m Thomas.”

Ballard squinted up at him.

“You don’t sound like the others,” he said.

“Nor do you.”

Without getting up, he reluctantly shook Thomas’s hand.

Thomas sat on his own bed and started to explain in the simplest terms what to expect and what was expected of him, but Ballard huffed petulantly over him, crossing and recrossing his arms. He was only to stay a year, and then he would return to London. Lesson learned.

A lie. The kind one tells children. Ballard got up and flung the clothes across the room. Thomas gathered the scattered articles and tossed them back onto the bed.

He attended Eton with plenty of his type, fagged for seniors like him, their cruelty seemingly proportional to his youthful prettiness. Those boys were monsters in his memories, and yet there one stood, no more terrifying than a milk-pale meringue. Thomas could have easily picked him up by the throat and thrown him to the ground as had been done to those clothes and to him.

“Sit.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Sit,” he repeated tonelessly.

Ballard stared Thomas down. The fear in his eyes burned easily through the veneer of arrogance. Thomas waited silently until he sat again and began studying his fingers.

Thomas proceeded to list the peeves of the senior guards, ways to avoid injury and stave off illness and boredom. The broad strokes and the minutiae. What he didn’t tell him was how the shock of his exile might not wear off. How in the mornings he might have to remind himself of where he was, and that this was his home now, and that this bed beneath him was the bed he would awake again in tomorrow. He didn’t tell him how there would be days when he might have to choose between sanity and dignity, and days when he wouldn’t think he could get up one more goddamn morning.

For a month, Ballard cried himself to sleep every night. Thomas wanted to strangle him.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

After squeezing as much light out of what little was left of his days to write, Thomas now squinted into the distance and, remembering Adams the apothecary, dreaded that he needed spectacles.

He looked down at the papers in his hands that he had sewn himself into two separate sheaves. After months of surveying the prisoners, seeking counsel from the skilled ones, and drawing up demands they could all agree to, he finally had a proposal of substance. It wasn’t perfect, but it was in Metternich’s words “perfect enough.” Thomas lamented though how abysmal his penmanship had become.

His appointment with Oglethorpe was scheduled between sunset and supper, ensuring that it couldn’t go on for long, and Oglethorpe was running late. But if there was one thing Thomas had vastly improved his mastery of, it was being patient.

Oglethorpe rubbed his chin as he read the first page. 

“A barber on the premises?”

Thomas stopped scratching his beard.

“A stipend to be collected, which, due to any extenuating circumstances, would be paid out to next of kin. Shares of any profits? A percentage to be set aside for those so maimed beyond capacity — they agreed to this?”

“We cannot call ourselves Christians if we do not carry each other’s burdens.”

Oglethorpe sighed warily. He tossed the list of demands aside and skimmed Thomas’s proposal. He immediately circled a clause with his finger. “This. An indigenous person for consultation.“

“No one knows the land better. The fact that you have not sought advisement from any of them could be considered counterintuitive by some.”

“Relations with the indigenous population are tenuous at best so both sides have adopted a policy of mutual non-interference.”

“Our presence here suggests it’s a little late for ‘non-interference.’ Perhaps this is an opportunity to improve those relations. Imagine how that would appear if you were the one to accomplish that. Your portrait could be hanging in the drawing rooms of very important men.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Milton, that is a matter for the trustees, not I. The obvious question of course is how do you figure paying for the initial costs of these programs?”

“Well, Mr. Oglethorpe, I figure it is time for a sizable duty hike on shame.”

Oglethorpe snorted in disbelief but made a cursory notation of it.

“Honestly,” he muttered to himself. “What I do not see here is a plan of action.”

“You may see it once you’ve agreed to new terms, and it is co-signed by a guarantor —“

“A what?”

“A guarantor. Someone to assume liability if you are unable to hold up your end.” Thomas walked over to the painting of the identically bewigged trustees and studied it. He pointed at random but with confidence. “I know him to an upstanding gentleman of excellent character. We spoke often of the inadequacy of the Bankruptcy Act in the corridors of the Banqueting House.”

Oglethorpe’s mouth opened in confusion.

“You do know who he is.”

“Look, we will secure a guarantor of my choosing and my choosing only.”

“Then Mr. Farrowgate ought to present the agreement to him here with Mr. Metternich as a witness.”

“Mr. Farrowgate?”

“Because he is an honest man.”

Oglethorpe narrowed his eyes at Thomas then at Farrowgate, who diverted his gaze to his feet.

“And we —“

“We?” 

Metternich grinned broadly at him.

“We will need access to Mr. Clay’s books.”

“Good lo— You understand all of this is wholly contingent on your plan’s profitability.”

“Does that mean you agree to new terms?”

“I am not saying anything at all!”

Thomas glanced once more at the painting before sitting back down. Oglethorpe brusquely leafed through the rest of the proposal. Upon turning a page, he knitted his brow.

“There appears to be two pages missing.”

“Pardon?”

Thomas leaned forward in the chair for a closer look at the ragged edges of what was left of the missing pages.

“What…”

_…the fuck?_

The supper bell tolled.

Thomas rushed back to the cabin ahead of Metternich, where he found as he suspected he would Ballard sitting at the table with the pages. His fingers were blackened with ink.

“I…” Thomas brought his hand to his side and tapped his frustration out on the bump of bone. “You could have asked.”

“Nothing here is yours. I don’t have to ask.”

“Do you know what it is that I am trying to accomplish?“

“Who cares? It doesn’t help me. It doesn’t even help you. _Dummy._ ”

“It cannot only be about you. I should like to think that’s not very difficult to understand.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand things!”

“You could try,” Thomas said in a more measured tone. “I can explai—“

“Oh, lardy-dar. You must have thought real highly of yourself if you still think who you were matters a mouse dropping now.”

Thomas winced.

“Well, you’re nobody, and you’re going to die here!”

He shot up to his feet, tipping the bench over, and stormed out of the cabin. He didn’t bother slamming the door, leaving the accent off his tantrum.

Thomas pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He waited until he couldn’t hear his profanity-laden muttering anymore to remove them. He righted the bench and sat down. He shuddered to think if he was ever that awful when he was young.

He lifted one of the pages, which detailed the skills and work histories of some of the prisoners. Most of the marks disappeared beneath black smears. What was still visible read like a madman’s ravings.

_...eeper…skins of lamb…hide…drowner…ter meadow…master…_

He flipped the page over. On the back was Ballard’s drawing of the oak tree executed in the artful strokes and hatching style of Titian.

Metternich emerged from his room, holding a chamberpot.

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“You hate the little bastard.”

Thomas sighed resignedly.

“Sayiiit,” he taunted.

“Can you please take that outside?”

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Unable to sleep, Thomas sat on the porch steps where he kept company with the other nocturnal creatures. Some were shuffling, snuffling shapeless things. Some sleek with glimmering eyes. None were in any hurry, having no dinner engagements at Grosvenor Square or early appointments at Whitehall.

Despite the long hiatus in operations, Thomas could still sometimes hear it. The mill.

 _Get up_ , it said. _Keep moving_ , it said.

He wondered if Bainbridge could hear it too.

Farrowgate subscribed to two sleeps as his father did. Between them, he periodically came by Thomas’s cabin with another possible remedy for his sleeplessness. One night it was a cordial of borage and violets. Another a slip of folded paper containing dried valerian. Last week it was a small dose of laudanum, the presence of which triggered a bout of palpitations.

His lantern appeared, bobbing along the trail. The light glinted off a bottle in his other hand. Alcohol wasn’t permitted, and what was available was reserved for guests and medicinal purposes only. Thomas could have effortlessly named ten other rules he would have preferred that Farrowgate break. When he sat down on the steps, Thomas could smell the bottle’s contents on him.

He pulled a book out of his coat pocket. It was a translated copy of the second volume of _Plutarch’s Lives_.

“Does this belong to Mr. Oglethorpe?”

“Mine.”

“I couldn’t.” He held the book out until Farrowgate took it back.

“Is there nothing that can help you?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

Thomas could see, even seated, he was swaying and surmised that that bottle was not his first of the evening. Farrowgate took a sloppy swig and grimaced.

“Your page. In Mr. Oglethorpe’s ledger.”

“What of it?”

“’T.M.’ That is all that is written on it. Payments received that I suspect were for your imprisonment were logged without attribution. Other than my documentation of your arrival, there is no actual record of you. Who you are. Who you claim to be anyway.”

“I think it goes without saying that my erasure was the intended result.”

“As I said before. There could be a place for you here. Mr. Oglethorpe is not an unreasonable man. You wouldn’t be doing any of… _that_ , if you did not think so yourself.”

“Please do not speak to me about reason.” 

Thomas gestured to the bottle. He had lost his taste for sugar but imbibed the rum deeply. It was not, at least, the potentially blinding, fly-ridden swill the men distilled in the woods.

“You have never considered returning to England?”

“There is no place for me there,” Farrowgate answered.

“A fellow expatriate then?” 

“I…I had known…a Catholic.”

“ _Oh._ ” Thomas handed the bottle back. “A Catholic. Oh…oh my.” 

He pressed the side of his fist hard to his mouth but failed to contain the eruption of laughter. Farrowgate’s eyes widened in horror, but even he was not entirely immune to the contagiousness of humor and let loose a weak laugh himself. The absurdity of it passed quickly, and they settled back into silent defeat.

“Since I have seen so little of it, why don’t you tell me about the new world?”

“And what would you like to hear about exactly? The illnesses that fell us by the score? The rampant venality of its appointed governors? How about — _the Puritans_.” Farrowgate tipped his head back, the bottle almost empty now.

“So the English are doomed to fail here.”

“Perfidy and damnation, Mr. Hamilton. You ought to be careful.”

“What ever shall be done with me?” 

“Prostrate yourself and exalt the Empire’s glory. May it forever be…be —”

“Everlasting? Absolute? Those who vaunt empires could use a few history lessons.”

“But what good are lessons when those you are trying to teach lack a predisposition for learning. Man may be of the most myopic of creatures, but with his ego to fill his sails, he only needs to see so far to cross entire oceans.”

“Then we should do well to leave all that England means to us behind. Regard this as our chance to write a story different from the one we’ve been told. Forge a path different from the ones the colonialists have already trodden —”

“ _God, how you talk._ Forge a path? To where?” He swept his arm at the dark. “You can’t — you can’t even leave!” 

An unseen animal scurried into the woods. The flame fluttered in the glass globe of the lantern. Farrowgate’s face became a composite of nervously shifting shadows.

“I am sorry, Thomas. I am very sorry.”

He hoisted himself to his feet. The bottle and book hit the ground. The light of the swinging lantern disappeared as he passed another cabin. He would be early for his second sleep.

Thomas picked the book up and brushed the dirt off of it. A man of stronger convictions might have left it there to warp in the morning dew then turn to pulp, but he chose not to be him tonight. With no light to read by, he lay in bed facing the window and waited for the creep of dawn.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

It wasn’t long before Ballard fell into the cadence of fieldwork. They always did. For succor, he hoped his father would send an additional remittance to let him work and live with the other so-called gentlemen. Away from the horse shit and mosquitos, away from the men he saw as beneath him, away from Thomas’s earnest lecturing. Thomas generously offered to plead his case to Oglethorpe directly.

Jonson stopped whistling. “Is that…? It’s that fool Spencer, isn’t it? What’s he doing over there?” 

Thomas shaded his eyes. Spencer’s form was unmistakable, having studied it so many nights. Sweating and panting profusely, he staggered towards them from the other side of the recently tilled patch by the rocks. He had gone all one color, his skin, his lips, the whites of his eyes. The same color as his work clothes. 

No one moved. Not a guard or prisoner.

Each step fell heavier than the last.

“Ballard, turn around,” Thomas said. 

For once, he listened.

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the it-gets-worse-before-it-gets-better chapter

“Three months? Three months…”

 _THREE MONTHS_.

“Did you hear that, my dear? He said —“

“Three months,” Miranda repeated.

“James, if we heard you correctly, you said —”

“Three months. Thereabouts. Depending on conditions at sea and on the ground in Nassau, could be longer.”

Thomas lowered himself onto the settee beside Miranda.

“Three months!”

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

The pan was still smoking when the gamekeeper removed the musket from his hands. The weather should have been too wet for the pyrite to spark or the powder to burn. The wheel could have stuck as it often did, requiring the village clockmaker, a hunchbacked septuagenarian, to unstick it. But on that chilly autumn day, the Fates were on his side. The musket went off clean, and his quarry was struck.

They tracked it for hours and found it miles into the birch forest. With each labored breath, a thin stream of blood issued from the ragged wound in its side. It kicked listlessly, jostling the heavy sack of its belly, and snorted, eyes blank. The gamekeeper unsheathed a broad knife and speared it through the neck. One swift, downward motion and the throat was severed with a crunch. Blood rushed out like wine from an overturned urn, burbling and bubbling, and saturated the ground black. As he wiped the blade on some fallen leaves, the gamekeeper told him the sooner an animal could run after being born, the more vulnerable it was meant be in life.

He instructed Thomas to stay with his trophy while he went to fetch an attendant. To pass the time, he sang carols and recited Barnfield sonnets. He counted the ticks that clung to its hide until the mist grew too thick to see. When it cleared, a pair of iron gates appeared before him. They were open, but he didn’t — he couldn’t. Everything inside of him screamed to go, to run as fast he could before they had a chance to fire.

 _Fire_.

Thomas woke with a start and the stink of burning sulfur in his nose. The cabin reassembled around him. The bed rose up to meet his body. The sun plummeted below the horizon, and the moon rose in his window. As the rest of his world settled back into place, he watched an anole scamper up the wall. It disappeared into the shadows, where his thoughts took shape and crawled out from.

If the ball shattered bone, he might pass out from the pain. If it struck a major artery, he might bleed out quickly from panic. If it pierced both lungs, they might fill, and he would drown.

He rubbed his eyes and chuckled. Like he was pondering the answer to some morbid riddle.

_I drown, yet I am so far from the sea. On dry land, how has this watery death befallen me?_

He opened the window wider and relished the cool air on his damp skin. Since Ballard decamped for less primitive dwellings, he also relished the privacy. In a bid for renewed drowsiness, he laid his hand on his groin, but his cock remained, for the seventeenth straight day, aloof to his touch. He didn’t have to blame the weather or the Fates for this.

Officially aged out of fieldwork, he was reassigned in the morning to curing. He and the other prisoners had schemed to reduce the sugarcane to the southwestern field, enough to keep Oglethorpe’s investors satisfied, but the harvest meant operations at the mill had to recommence. With his senses still equating its smells with the smell of blood, he spent half of his first day retching over a fence, the other half trying not to. After a week of this with little improvement, the other prisoners banded together to bring their complaints to Farrowgate. Thomas watched them swarm Waltham and the overseer and gesture at him as he rested against the fence. He was buoyed by their growing self-confidence even as they were trying to rid themselves of him.

Farrowgate threw his hands up in defeat. The guards drew their cudgels, dispersing the crowd.

Oglethorpe crossed his arms and mulled over what to do with his perennial pest. Farrowgate suggested that Thomas focus on managing the accounting for each prisoner now that the plantation had been turning a profit. It was tedious work, but it was safe work. Comfortable work. It wouldn’t split his toenails or grind his joints. He could gain back much needed weight. And no one needed to know that maths were never his strong suit.

After organizing the prisoners’ records then poring over Clay’s books line by line, reconciling their debts against the plantation’s net income, he faltered on one: Metternich’s. He looked over his sums repeatedly in search of an error, assuming there was an error, but found none. According to his renegotiated contract, Metternich’s debt had been paid in full, a year earlier than his original term. Six years of indentured servitude and imprisonment later, he could finally leave. His whoops reverberated throughout the plantation.

With his affairs put in order, Farrowgate placed a pile of exit documents in front of him. Quill in hand, Metternich squinted at the tightly written words with unrested, rum-fogged eyes. So this was what freedom looked like, covered margin to margin in impenetrable verbiage. Oglethorpe urged him on. The sooner he signed, the sooner he would be free. Thomas eased the quill out from between Metternich’s fingers and the documents from beneath his nose. He leaned back in the chair, made himself comfortable, and proceeded to read each and every word.

When the day finally came, they sat on the porch steps and waited for the sun to rise. In the hushed voices of early morning, they speculated warily about the future. Thomas brought out the Bible wherein Metternich’s finger landed unhelpfully on a passage about circumcision.

The guards came to collect him, and they made their way to the front gates. Metternich shuffled his feet and repeatedly patted down his coat, nervous about rejoining a world that wasn’t forgiving to men with pasts like his. Thomas reminded him that he was a free man now, and that was all anyone needed to know. He shouldn’t allow the narrow minds of others to put him in another cage. Metternich’s mouth twisted in agitation around words that never came forth. Thomas thanked him for resisting the urge to point out the obvious.

“Still talking like someone who hasn’t lost everything. I swear it’s not —”

“I know.” Thomas laughed.

Metternich asked that he spare him any grandiose allusions to history or literature either. After all they had not made war. They had made a sieve.

Oglethorpe and Farrowgate awaited them at the gates with a pair of armed guards. Oglethorpe awkwardly gripped Thomas’s shoulder in a forced show of approval. Thomas was aware that for every thing he helped to accomplish he was also burnishing Oglethorpe’s bona fides to a fine shine. Mediocrity always found a way to rise, and he would on their backs. Thomas took a step to the side, and the hand fell away.

The guards opened the gates. Metternich walked through them. Thomas did not. Once they were locked again, they all unceremoniously went their separate ways.

The day was suitably lovely, calling for a leisurely walk back to the cabin. Cool and sun-dappled beneath the trees, and the air scented with all things in bloom, enough days were that one could be fooled into thinking that this was living. An absurdly divine light filled his cabin and bathed every plank and stick in its igneous glow. He stood in the doorway, held there by the thick stillness and silence of its emptiness. He felt Metternich’s departure not unlike death, and grief scratched at the inside of his chest.

He crouched down and picked up the drawing that had been slipped beneath the door earlier. The dark bay carthorse rendered in red and black chalk. He sat down at the table with it. The skid of the bench’s legs against the floor was deafening. He wished…he wished there was music.

A knock came at the door. He could see Farrowgate through the dirty window with his new housemate in tow.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas stopped on the road when he noticed unusual activity around the great house. Instead of working the fields, a small army of prisoners was trimming the shrubbery and scrubbing mildew off the siding. Smythe and another guard stood out front, an open crate on the ground between them.

“Milton.” Smythe waved him over.

The three men looked down into the crate.

“You can read this gibberish, can’t you? What’s it say?”

Thomas brushed aside the straw. “Not for themselves but for others.”

“Eh? And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It might be more appropriate to ask Mr. Oglethorpe what it means to him.”

The walls of the house were patched and whitewashed, the windows cleaned, and the carpets beaten. The new motto was attached to the front gates. Thomas returned the following week in the afternoon and found the servants lined up in the entrance hall, poised and silent like soldiers at attention. He approached Emmeline, who shooed him away before he could open his mouth. Farrowgate emerged from the drawing room and pulled Thomas into Oglethorpe’s office.

“You were not supposed to come in today. One of the trustees is here.”

Thomas shrugged his hand off. “Someone should have informed me then.”

Farrowgate paused in thought then muttered through gritted teeth, “Buxton.”

Thomas collected the ledgers from Farrowgate’s desk and settled himself at a card table by a window.

“Hamilton, you need to lea—“

The doors to the office opened. Oglethorpe stopped talking mid-sentence at the sight of them. The well-dressed man accompanying him took in the room until his eyes tripped over Thomas.

“Why, Mr. Oglethorpe, there appears to be one of the —”

“ _Yes_. He is, er, he is here under my auspices.”

“Is he? Well, isn’t that interesting.”

“Isn’t it indeed? The men here have roles in all aspects of the plantation’s concerns. I believe it cultivates a sense of responsibility, you see, of ownership that is essential to their…rehabilitation. To becoming more productive members of society.”

“Oh, most fascinating. And so innovative!”

Farrowgate and Oglethorpe glanced at each other when the gentleman broke away from them. He walked over to Thomas and tilted his head to casually inspect his marks.

“You are an educated man?”

Thomas looked at Oglethorpe, who was pouring out port for his guest. Farrowgate’s eyes bored into him, the vein in his forehead on the verge of rupturing.

“Christ Church.”

“Oh-ho! I as well! And what is your name?”

“My —“

Oglethorpe handed the gentleman a glass and placed another next to Thomas’s hand.

“This is our Tom Mi—”

“Thomas Hamilton.” He stood up. The corner of Oglethorpe’s mouth twitched. “My father is Alfred Hamilton, the Earl of Ashbourne.”

Farrowgate insistently cleared his throat. Thomas ignored him and drained the glass of wine in one fell swoop.

“Sir Ashford, let us speak in the parlor where we can be more comfortable.” Oglethorpe gestured to the doors then nodded sharply at Farrowgate.

“Alfred Hamilton’s son? Ohhhh, yes, that is right. The eldest son. Ah, yes, yes, yes, of course. You had quite the reputation back in London. _Oof_. How could one forget? _Quite_ the reputation. It is no surprise then that you have ended up here!” He gave Thomas’s shoulder a playful tap with his knuckle. “Allow me, my lord, to offer my sincerest condolences to you.”

“Condolences?”

Had his brother passed at such a young age? His mother was long dead of course, and while he needed reminding on occasion, he was not dead.

“Do you not know?”

“I apologize. Know what?”

“Sir Ashfo—“

“Some time ago — oh god, years? Has it been? Oh god, it has! Your father was on his way to Carolina when his ship was attacked by pirates. God, _pirates_ , can you imagine? He was, I am awfully, _awfully_ saddened to say, slain by those monsters.”

“’Slain,’ you say? ‘Monsters,’ you say?” Thomas nodded as he absorbed these words. “Thank you.”

“Shall we?” Oglethorpe beseeched.

“Oh, I suppose we shall, Mr. Oglethorpe. Dreadfully sorry to impart such unhappy news. Although why it was withheld from you eludes me entirely. In any case, it was a pleasure to meet you.”

Ashford put out his hand. Thomas hesitated before grasping it. Ashford smiled cheerfully at him before following Oglethorpe out of the room.

Farrowgate came up to the table and tentatively touched the surface.

“Losing your father… Whatever the nature of your relationship with him had been, you must be devastated.”

“Hm? Yes. Yes, I am…I am beside myself.”

Thomas ran his finger distractedly on his lower lip as he pondered the pirates’ renewed presence in his life. His wife, his lover. And now his father. Could they somehow find him here too and end their sordid tale for good?

Laughter carried over from across the entrance hall. Thomas’s stomach lurched upon hearing Oglethorpe’s. He sat back down and stared at the figures in the ledger until they dropped out of focus. The quill snapped in his fingers and flecked the pages with ink.

“He’s dead.”

“Take the rest of the day — the week to mourn. But you need to leave, and I am asking you to do so voluntarily. I do not want any more trouble.”

“‘Trouble’? _Trouble_?”

“Thomas, I —“

He threw down the broken quill. On his way out, he grabbed the decanter of port off Oglethorpe’s desk.

He returned to his cabin but stopped short of the porch steps. The structure, so small and so plain, brought to mind a pauper’s casket. He turned off the path and headed into the woods behind it.

A trail led to a clearing where some of the men drank their rotgut, and Thomas drank Oglethorpe’s port. At the center of it was a poplar tree into which they carved the initials of the dead. At the bottom of this informal roster was a lone “S.” Thomas picked up the flint arrowhead that lay among the roots and scraped an “H” next to it. For Howard, Spencer’s given name.

Another trail took him further into the woods. Having no use for an empty decanter, he hurled it at a boulder. The tinny sound of it shattering echoed inside his chest. A sensation he found terribly gratifying. As he walked along, eager to replicate it, he snatched up abandoned bottles from the leaf litter and flung them at the trees with increasing force, one after the other, setting birds off into the sky. The trail eventually ended and signs of human life with it. Thomas was vibrating with the need to break more things.

He gazed up at the canopy then around himself, disoriented and drunk. He considered going back the way he came, but whichever direction he went in, he would always end up in the same place. So he continued onward. When he reached the other side of the forest, he was met with the endless expanse of the far southern wall. The land that ran adjacent to it had been cleared of any growth like a rough-hewn bowling green. The lone watchtower lacked a ladder, and its base, overgrown with chickweed, indicated a lengthy vacancy. He walked out into the open space and looked left, right. There was no one around, and all he could hear was the throbbing whine of the cicadas.

As it was at Bethlem, the walls that could be seen from the plantation’s entrance were shorter, less intimidating to visitors. And as it was at Bethlem, the real walls had nearly twice the height and depth.

Thomas stood on his toes and reached up as high as he could. The tips of his fingers just touched a line of exposed brick. He ran his palms over the concrete surface and picked at crumbling pits where seedlings had taken root. He laid both hands flat against it and pressed lightly, experimentally. Then pushed. And pushed. Then pushed harder. And harder. Then stopped. Fearful that he would soon claw at it and kick it and beat it with his fists and his head, and keep pushing and not stop until every part of him broke. Breathless and sweating, he rested his forehead against the wall and swallowed down a rising sob. He gave it a single, anemic slap.

The galloping of a horse interrupted his tactile study. He took a step back and turned west towards the sound, but the setting sun blinded him.

“Hamilton!”

It was Farrowgate.

“You are not permitted here unsupervised. Get back to your quarters.”

Thomas stood in his path. Farrowgate yanked on the reins, pulling the horse into an abrupt stop.

“My father. Is dead.”

He stormed off. Farrowgate intercepted him then dismounted.

“Look, the particulars of your imprisonment are only known to Oglethorpe. The only explanation is that someone else has ensured its continuation.”

Thomas stopped in his tracks. He clutched his head when it occurred to him who would.

“You know.”

He screamed at the earth. Peter- _Peter_.

“This person. He is concerned with what you might do if you were released?”

“What he sees in his own character has no relevance to mine!”

“All right. Enough. You need to return, or you could get the whip for this.”

“But only if you speak of it. Will you speak of it? Because who is here? Waltham? Tunstaple? Smythe? That dullard Buxton? You could have sent any of them to find me, but you came instead. Why?”

Thomas rushed Farrowgate and grabbed him by the plackets of his coat.

“ _Why?_ ”

Farrowgate dropped the reins and fumbled for his cudgel.

“Did you follow me?”

“What? No.”

“How did you find me then?”

“I —“

“What is that you want from me?”

“What?”

In Farrowgate’s panicked confusion, Thomas seized the cudgel from him. He smacked the horse on its flank, sending it away.

“Do you know what they call you behind your back?”

“Who? What?”

“‘Piglet.’ Because of your name, _Farrow_ gate, they call you ‘Piglet.’ And Oglethorpe is your swollen-titted sow.”

Farrowgate’s eyebrows rose.

“You-you need to return to your quarters. You shouldn’t be here.”

Thomas nodded vigorously in agreement. He offered the cudgel back to him.

“Since I am no more alive than my rotten shit of a father, you could do whatever you want to me, couldn’t you? Beat me, break me, make me beg.”

“I — no — this is not that kind of place.”

“Then get on your knees.”

“ _What?_ ”

Thomas gripped the cudgel more tightly. Farrowgate clumsily lowered himself to the ground.

“What is it that you want?”

Farrowgate shook his head frantically.

“You must want… _something_ from this life of yours. To want nothing — I don’t believe it.”

The shaking of his head slowed.

“Why will you not speak? _Speak_. Of anything at all!”

Farrowgate remained answerless. Seemingly resigned to whatever would follow, he shut his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest. His hat tumbled off. Sweat had pasted his hair down to his head, accentuating the contours of his skull. Such an easy thing it would be to break.

His shoulders started to shake as if he wept. If he wept, he made no sound. If we wept, it was no wonder that he could in silence. But for all that any of this mattered, he might as well have been laughing.

Thomas looked at the cudgel in his hand and saw it for the first time. Saw the horse grazing by the wall, not having gone very far.

“I should return. As should you. It will soon be too dark to be out here,” Thomas said flatly. “Clay said…Mr. Clay said he has been looking to employ a groundskeeper. That is good to hear.”

He tossed the cudgel down beside Farrowgate and turned towards the woods.

“I look forward to meeting him.”

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas had written five letters. One to Miranda’s aunt. One to Wintersloe. One to his brother. One to Keswick’s wife. Even one to his father. The guards found every one of them on Metternich’s person. Oglethorpe claimed new procedures — for Thomas’s protection of course — as he pocketed them.

By then the fictions his father and Peter disseminated had probably become truths too comfortable to question in order to take a madman’s missives seriously, but he still had to try. The wasted paper and effort might have pained him more than the loss of possible contact. For hours he sat at that desk with years of words roiling inside his head to write what was a letter to a man long dead.

_…You asserted frequently that you act at the behest of reason and pragmatism, but you have shown yourself to be more hidebound by antiquated notions of hegemony and social order, none of which is in any way reasonable or pragmatic. One can see how a witness to the Civil War should want to preserve the status quo. The illusion of stability can be a most comforting thing, I know this well, especially for those in power, but my sympathies end when the cost is the unfair treatment of too many under the current system. The world will never stop changing for good or for ill, and you cannot disappear all who seek to spur change. I may have failed, I may have been wrong, but perhaps my ideas will germinate in minds far greater than my own, and that is enough for me to have hope for a better future. Inevitably you and your ideological kin will be left behind, maundering about how things should be, how they used to be, while your graves are being dug…_

“’S’a lot of words when a hearty ‘fuck you’ would suffice, don’t you think?”

Unbeknownst to Metternich, the letter he ended up slipping into the lining of his coat did just say only that. A pity that his father could not have been able to read it, but knowing that Oglethorpe most likely did, it served its purpose.

The pages of the ledger caught a breeze and flapped hither and thither, jolting Thomas out of his reverie. Alone in Oglethorpe’s office, he had been watching prisoners, former coopers, build crates instead of doing his work. The guards kept a close eye on them, as they did anything entailing transport off the plantation. Thomas had given up trying to slip a note in one. With no means to bribe the guards or ask the maids for favors, his will to reach the outside world had more or less withered. He dropped the quill in its holder and laid his hands on the book to calm the fluttering pages.

“Mr. Milton,” Clay thundered as he entered the room. He was followed by Branfort and Branford, and the heated conflict that brought them there.

“This is clearly a matter for Mr. Farrowgate, not I,” Thomas protested.

“Mr. Farrowgate is not well. If you can believe it. Man has never taken a day of rest.”

“Oh. That is unfortunate.”

“What is unfortunate is the impression these men are under that your opinion holds more value than my orders. God knows why. They and their crews have actually refused to work until they have heard from you. Which makes me wonder, have I been mistaken in thinking this place is a prison and that you are all prisoners?”

“I assure you that you are not mistaken. And while I know nothing of beans, I do know tha —”

Despite this admission, the two men began to argue vehemently for their preferred bean to grow with the corn. Thomas’s attention bounced back and forth between them as he struggled to make sense of their crosstalk. Clay leaned back and glared at him.

“Beans,” Thomas huffed as he sized up the two men. Branfort was the friendlier of the two and popular with all stripes. Denying him would give Thomas the most trouble, but Branford was the more experienced farmer.

They simultaneously halted their quarreling to hear his decision.

Thomas inhaled.

“Plant both.”

He dropped his head into his hand before the complaints would ensue, but to his astonishment, none did. When he raised his head, the men were already leaving the room.

“Huh.”

He shut the ledger and put his feet up on a chair.

“Huh.”

More and more, Thomas found himself alone in that room. With enough political capital accrued, Oglethorpe embarked on a campaign for his governorship, taking him to genteel drawing rooms around the colonies, and was gone for weeks-long stretches. The burden of minding Thomas had become unworthy of the overseers’ time so without discussion they left him to his own devices. Only the odd servant flitted in and out, Clay or Farrowgate to fetch a daybook, all attempts to ensnare them in conversation successfully thwarted.

Thomas took this as his opportunity to explore the office. Namely the contents of Oglethorpe’s desk and the drinks cabinet he judiciously sampled from. After a few weeks of steady neglect, he added naps on the sun-warmed sofa to these rituals. After another few weeks, the reorganization of the library according to his preferences was completed, and the low levels of liquor bordered on apparent. Thomas scanned the room for an overlooked nook and concluded that all nooks had been thoroughly looked over. It was clear that his curiosity had outgrown the office.

He peeked out into the entrance hall. A solitary guard dozed in the corner by the front doors. He wandered down the main gallery where servants darted about with baskets of laundry and hauled whole hogs over their shoulders. Clay kept a much more informal house than his family did, but this was a place of work not habitation. There were no attending footmen to anticipate and meet every need. No one to pay him any mind as he rattled every doorknob.

His discoveries consisted mostly of dusty cupboards and back stairwells, but near the butler’s pantry, he stumbled on an unused music room that housed a harp and a few chairs. When he opened the door, the light fell on a mural, a crude copy of Tintoretto’s painting of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas. An oft-depicted story as he and Miranda learned on their travels around the continent. Upon seeing the original work, he wondered why for all the story’s passion and violence, they were absent in this painting. Miranda suggested that maybe even artists needed a break from passion and violence once in a while. Thomas made a pinched face at the notion.

He wiped the dust off the harp’s neck with a handkerchief to uncover the luster of its gold patina. He plucked a few strings then lightly strummed them. Instead of the teeth-gnashing discord his musical incompetence usually wrought, it yielded such dulcet tones that the room and his mood instantly brightened. He threw open the curtains and rearranged the chairs, added a few purloined throw pillows and objets d’art to make it a space for himself. He returned to read or work but sometimes to pick at the instrument while he absentmindedly gazed at the mural.

One was supposed to understand the story as another grisly lesson about the dangers of hubris. To Thomas however, hubris seemed too pat a reason if one presumed the gods would change the rules to ensure their victory as they always did. His teachers had come to expect this kind of thinking from him. Even decried it as cocky and impertinent. They asked that he observe the standard readings of text, and, for God’s sake, stop looking for what was not there.

“Can we consider that his intention was not to demonstrate the superiority of his musical artistry but to share the beauty of man’s song with the gods? And this he believed was the only way they would condescend to listen to it? I don’t see why it is so preposterous to think that his willingness to submit himself to their whims was not the product of hubris but of —”

“‘ _Love_ ’?“ The other students snickered when their teacher sighed dramatically at Thomas being Thomas again.

With Miranda’s arm wound around his, they strolled through the galleries of the Palacio del Buen Retiro where they studied another painting of a luminously pale Apollo taking a knife to Marsyas’s swarthy skin. She squeezed Thomas’s hand as he, suddenly overcome by an inarticulable sense of recognition, brushed away a tear.

He shut the door behind him and slipped down a back stairwell to the lower ground level. He walked to the scullery at the end of a dimly lit corridor, drawn to the spirited voices of the women there. They gossiped and sang loudly and argued over nothing and absolutely everything. It felt like life to Thomas.

“Scullery…manservant. No. Scullion,” Catherine corrected Grace.

“What does it matter what we call him? It will be a cold day in hell when I see a man scrub these pots. In here, everyone is a maid!” Grace retorted.

Thomas feigned indignation. Other Grace put up a pitiful defense of his manhood. He knew where this line of talk was heading and removed himself from his perch, having no desire to scrub pots either. When he passed through the larder, Philippa tossed him a peach.

He ventured up to the first story and ambled around the ostentatiously large table in the meeting room. He ran his fingers over the smooth nail heads of the chair backs and adjusted the slightly crooked paintings. He walked down another gallery and up another flight of stairs. He wandered past a number of untouched guest bedrooms until he reached the one he figured would have the most light. Already ajar, the door only needed a gentle push, and it yawned open.

The room couldn’t have been more different than his old bedroom. Absent were the heavy textiles and wood paneling to seal one in from the misery of English weather. It had walls of white plaster, and the bed was draped in netting, everything designed to let air in and reflect the light. He sat on the bed and sank deliciously into the down-filled mattress. Miranda chided him about his shoes when he swung his feet over onto it. He watched the gauzy curtains rise and fall as he ate the peach.

He pushed himself down from the headboard and nestled his head into the pillow. He arched his back in search of the resistance of a plank or the prick of straw and, well pleased, felt neither. He stretched his too long legs and ran his too long arm over the empty side of the bed, luxuriating in its breadth. He imagined sliding naked beneath the covers, the clean sheets against his skin. His hand came to rest on the other pillow and wound soft locks of auburn hair around his fingers. He imagined the crush of a body rolling over his arm, the crush of it against his side, ribs against ribs, and the crush of lips against lips. Wet and warm and sweet like ripe fruit.

His legs fell open, his mouth too, and he pressed a hand to his inner thigh. It was an old song sung poorly, one he thought forgotten. At the end of the verse, he returned to reality more lucid than he would have liked. The sun. The curtains. The tick of a clock. The taste of the peach on his teeth. He threw his legs over the side of the bed. It took mere seconds and wasn’t much more than a jerk of his hips.

Watching him from between the eastern windows was King George, whose heavy-lidded eyes followed all throughout the house. Queen Anne would have graced that space up until a few months ago when Oglethorpe ordered all the bells to toll. As he stared at the painting, he felt a breath on his ear and that voice, Keswick’s voice, wriggling deep into it. He could almost smell his sorely missed perfume of orange blossom and jasmine. He pushed himself off the bed, walked up to the painting, and wiped his hand clean on His Majesty’s jowls.

He left the room, and something shifted in the corner in his eye as he closed the door.

“Jesus!” he spluttered and grabbed his chest.

A figure stood at the other end of the corridor. Assured it was not an apparition, Thomas squinted at him, his eyesight not quite what it used to be. The man’s work clothes were lighter than the dun-colored garb he wore. Instead of the standard-issue latchet shoes, polished boots covered his feet.

His brain clicked. This man had to be —

“Lord Whos—“ _Shit_.

Thomas hurried towards him, but he was already through the entrance to the servants’ back stairwell. Before he disappeared down the steps, he glanced over his shoulder at him. Thomas knew that face. By the time he reached the stairwell, he was gone.

Thomas tried to hold onto that face in his mind, knowing how quickly time and preconceptions could alter it. There were too many other faces to sift through if its twin was among them. So many faces. So many lives he had known, and they were all only memories now. Nothing but memories. He wondered how Hooke would diagnose this failure to recall. Maybe he’d implicate an impediment between the soul's radiation and the warehoused image of this mysterious man. Or some such recondite concept Thomas never fully grasped.

He swung around onto the top step of the grand staircase as Farrowgate crossed the main floor landing. He didn’t seem to see Thomas initially but that sharp-cornered thing that still lay between them, the incident that was barely yet a memory itself. Farrowgate furrowed his brow and pointed his chin in the direction of Oglethorpe’s office. The apologies and explanations Thomas had rehearsed in lieu of sleeping raced to the tip of his tongue, but Farrowgate strode away before he could reach him, leaving them unspoken once more.

This was his punishment, he supposed, one Farrowgate must have deduced he’d feel more acutely than the customary measures. To be deprived of his voice, or rather for him to capitulate to it. He couldn’t disagree that he deserved this. He reluctantly returned to the office and closed the doors.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

It was Sunday, the only day when there was no where for Thomas to be, not even the chapel, but he rose at dawn anyway.

He looked in the mirror. Could do with a shave and a haircut.

He made some tea and reviewed the list of prisoners due for release next week.

He set aside his washing and made his bed. Fetched water from the well and rinsed out his cup.

He hastily swept the porch. One of the boards was a bit loose.

He was running low on ink. Would need a new blotter and more paper as well.

He gazed out the window and wondered how Bainbridge was doing, how Metternich was doing.

He heard new books arrived. Never did see Oglethorpe read.

He didn’t have to work today. Perhaps he could help with the irrigation planning.

He spotted a stag last night behind the cabin. But how did it get past the walls? Did he dream it?

Six years in this place.

This fact sank inside him like a stone.

The pencil slipped from his fingers. It clacked and rotated a few times on the floor. He watched and waited for it to still completely before reaching down to retrieve it. The hinges of the door suddenly creaked. He looked up. It was being pushed open by a grimy hand, Tunstaple’s hand. He stepped inside uninvited with Buxton following behind. If Thomas had to be somewhere, they would have sent another prisoner to get him. He stood and placed the pencil on the desk. Buxton reached for his cudgel.

They ushered him in silence to the great house and into Oglethorpe’s office. Farrowgate hovered off to the side with another pair of guards. He gave Thomas an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Oglethorpe rose from his chair and clasped his hands behind his back like Thomas’s old headmaster used to do.

“May I ask why I have been called upon like this? It is my day off.”

“Mr. Hamilton —”

“I cannot think why my humble presence would be required for anything so urgent.”

Oglethorpe looked down and sighed. Thomas turned to Farrowgate who shook his head again.

“I did hope that over the years you would come to the realization that I am not the villain you have convinced yourself that I am. My receptiveness to working with you — a man who was deemed a threat to others and to himself, a man to whom I owe nothing — to improve the circumstances of the laborers is proof of this. Is it not? If anyone has embraced the infallibility of man with true patience and kindness, it is I. Therefore some trespasses I have been willing to overlook, but some are also too great to ignore. After all the chances I have given you to take it upon yourself to cease yours, you continued them with impunity. Even the poor maids haven’t been spared your… _influence_. You of all people with-with your breeding and your education should know how disruptive your actions can be to the general order of things.”

“Mr. Oglethorpe, you’ll have to pardon me for failing to see your point —”

“Yes, you do. We know you see it. _God_.” Oglethorpe took a second to collect himself. “All I have asked from you is respect. Not for me — oh, no, that is not why I have chosen this line of work — but for the…institutional framework, if you will, that men like you conceived and have brought here to the new world. How can we expect others to abide by their places within it if you openly express disdain for it? Every man has his lot in life, whether he be a ploughman or a nobleman, and it is the institution that guarantees civilized society functions for all of us, even for those who have been ostracized from it.”

“I…” Thomas looked around the room, at all the faces looking at him. “Will someone please explain to me what the hell is going on? Why have I been brought here?”

Oglethorpe put his hands on his hips.

“See? This is exactly what I mean. Even now you refuse to recognize boundaries and principles of behavior. That is what put you here, and that is what will keep you here. It is shameful that you still will not see reason to reform yourself despite your many faults. God resisteth the proud, Mr. Hamilton, but giveth grace unto the humble.”

“Oh? And who are you to judge another? Burying the bodies outside of these walls where we cannot see them does not mean you will escape the judgment of God —”

“Mr. Hamilton—”

“If you are not your brother’s keeper then what are you?”

“Mr. Oglethorpe.”

Both men pivoted to Farrowgate.

“I apologize for interrupting, sir. But perhaps you and I can discuss an alternate form of discipline for Mr. Hamilton.”

“‘Discipline’?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” Oglethorpe returned his attention to Thomas. “Him too? Christ… Well, I think we are very much done here.”

He flapped his hand at the guards before sitting down. “Gentlemen, please.”

Tunstaple approached him with a coil of rope at his side. The thoughts that rioted and clamored in Thomas's head, he fought the worst of them. He had to. He dodged Tunstaple’s reach. He told himself he would see the other side of this. _He had to._ Tunstaple surged at him. Thomas didn’t know how not to. He reared up, colliding into Buxton and inadvertently knocking him onto his seat. He bent to help him up but was struck across the back. He slumped to the floor on all fours, stunned. Buxton swore profusely as he scrambled to his feet. He momentarily loomed over Thomas before bringing his heel down on the fingers of his right hand.

“Mr. Buxton!” Farrowgate shouted.

“All of this could have been avoided if you had done your job, Farrowgate,” Oglethorpe muttered as he wiped the face of his pocket watch with his shirt cuff.

Thomas lay in a taut curl, seized up by pain, unable to even cry out. The guards hauled him up by the arms. Tunstaple bound his wrists using what Thomas couldn’t help noting was a figure-of-eight knot.

As they headed towards the doors, Farrowgate grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Damn it, if you apologi—”

“I am sorry, Richard,” Thomas slurred. “I am sorry.”

Farrowgate yanked his hand away and stumbled backwards into a bookcase. He sagged against it like all the air had gone from him. Like he would collapse into himself.

Oglethorpe instructed them to leave through the front and take the long way around to the back. They all followed Buxton in a queue with Thomas at the end, pulled along like a recalcitrant mule.

The prisoners in the fields rose out of their hunches as he was paraded past them. They must have wondered what grave infraction he had committed that occasioned this and not the usual beating or confinement to a shed. Thomas shook with acidic laughter. He pictured himself among them, watching him and wondering what he had done too.

They gathered at a spot beneath the oak tree where it was clearest of the lowest-hanging of the gnarled branches. Thomas craned his neck and looked up. From this vantage point, the crown was so vast that it spanned far beyond his scope of vision. He thought of the grandest trees on the Ashbourne estate, the ones Oswyn said were several centuries old. How he ascertained the ages of trees Thomas didn’t know, but he was confident that this one was older than the oldest of them. It surely stood long before any colonist stepped foot in the Americas, and, if God was good, it would outlive them all.

Buxton walked around Thomas, the whip’s fall snaking through the patchy grass. Tunstaple guided the rope along the chosen branch, trying to find a point that best accommodated Thomas’s height.

“Jesus, get on with it. It’s almost tea, and I’m starved.”

“All right, all right. You and your goddamn bellyaching.”

Once he found a suitable spot, he pulled on the rope until Thomas’s arms were fully extended.

A mosquito buzzed persistently around him. He grunted, annoyed, and smacked his neck. The buzzing ceased. He stared at the blot of blood on his palm.

“’S’a lot of words when a hearty ‘fuck you’ would suffice, don’t you think?”

With a non-committal shrug, Metternich handed the letter back to Thomas. He suggested a punchier ending, the written equivalent of spitting in the old man’s eye. Thomas quickly read through it again. In light of Metternich’s comment, he could hear how insufferably civil his words were. Where was the rage? The fury? Given every reason to, why didn’t he roar and rail?

Of course he knew what his father did with his anger, the humiliation and degradation of those who crossed him. Petty, ugly, and cruel. Thomas knew the anger that resided in himself — saw it in ways he never thought he would. His might not be the stuff of Euripides, a conflagration in which the soul burned and the consequent ashes to blacken the world with. But anger like love had many faces, and his did not have to look like his father’s or anyone else’s. If, for some, anger was life’s fire, it could be for him the sun to which he rose. It could be the light that showed him a better path forward.

He dipped the quill in the inkwell and set it to paper. He thanked his father for affording him the resources to form his own mind. He thanked him for inspiring such insolent and reckless curiosity. He thanked him for the motivation to test the limits of his empathy.

He thanked him again and again and again for delivering James to him.

 _…James_.

He grabbed the rope with his left hand to steady himself.

 _James_.

He ran his finger over the name, dragging the wet ink across into the next word. That he hadn’t said it or thought it in so long dawned on him. And yet the passage of time had done little to dull the pain of losing him or the love he still harbored. Each other’s match in intensity, the two feelings were so alike, consuming and fiercely bright. Like the man himself.

 _James_.

The resentment ebbed, and he smiled. He folded the letter in half and set it aside. Perhaps he would keep it. Perhaps he would burn it.

A breeze carried in the treacly scent of the honeysuckle though the open window. The morning resounded with the staccato refrain of a woodpecker. The murmur of daily activity gradually filtered in.

He awoke with his face buried in a pillow and his fingers bound to splints. Trapped between his chest and the pallet was a small vial. He held it up and blearily inspected the drops that clung to its walls. Laudanum. Of course. The glass captured the sun just so and scattered refracted light around the room. He twisted it back and forth in a show for himself until he couldn’t. It landed with a flat clink next to his shirt, which lay in rust-colored tatters.

He closed his eyes again. This was the most sleep he had in years.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> working that "Absolutely no plot whatsoever" tag _real_ hard.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> t.ham loves to love + someone shows up

Having reached an unexpected impasse, Miranda and Thomas paused to look at each other in mutual befuddlement. On the roof, steeped in the violet of evening, they had been plotting to recruit the moon, the tides, the reefs, and the wind too, if it was being agreeable, for a mission to deliver a wondrous creature of the sea to the countryside, where a boy lived alone in a forbidding castle, but lost the thread at the bottom of a bottle.

It was a silly story, an attempt to distract themselves from the pointed longing that inadvisable quantities of alcohol had failed to smooth down. They refused to be discouraged though, and Thomas unsealed another bottle. Miranda held out her empty glass. Unlike Thomas, she preferred not to drink her inspiration directly from the source. Not that if she did, Thomas would see anything untoward about it.

“Certain objects, you understand, fragile objects, like the one in your hand, have posed grave threats to my life when-when I have been in similar states of intemperance,” Thomas endeavored mightily to explain. “If I circumvent their use — should the theory hold — I can reduce the probability of dying by…a lot.” 

Thomas slid back his cuff to expose his wrist.

“Look, my dear.”

“Are you trying to show me that flyspeck of a mark again?“

“‘Flyspeck’? Dearest dear, would you be this callous if you’d seen the glass slip and — shatter? And the — blood? If you had seen — James?” He twirled his hand vaguely about. “Off came his cravat, and like a gentleman — a real gentleman, not the kind accorded the designation solely by his social status — stanched this near fatal wound with it.”

Miranda snorted and licked spilled wine off the side of her thumb. “Doubtless you swooned at this magnificent display of gallantry.”

“Right into his arms.”

“And into his breeches. ‘My lord, but your injury!’”

“Must you sully this memory with your lustful ways?” Thomas tutted. He clasped his hands beneath his chin and murmured, “Our father, which art in Heaven, forgive my dear, dear wife for the sin — good _god_ , so much sin — that dwells within her heart —”

Miranda slapped his thigh, sending wine over the rim of her glass again and Thomas a-titter.

“Shall we return to the matter at hand? A conspiracy of cosmic proportions requires a little forethought, yes?”

“Indeed, m’lady.”

He raised the bottle and gazed at the warped, green moon inside of it.

“Ah, there is our co-conspirator. May I poorly explain to you how it affects the tides?” He shook the bottle, the wine standing in for waves. “A lesson in astrology —”

“Astronomy.“

“— could be more conducive to fabulating than lovesick reminiscences.” Thomas took a swig then perked up like a dog at a phantom noise. “Astrology! If he heard me even say that word, he’d —”

“Have you over his knee? I suspect you’d develop a sudden and very keen interest in astrology then.”

“Whatever are you insinuating?”

Miranda cocked an eyebrow. “Honestly, the two of you. I’ll wager that our lieutenant beds down with Mr. Aurelius each night.”

While the likelihood of this was questionable, the thought alone tested the ties that held Thomas together. A sentimental animal, he did yearn for such a token for himself but asked so much of James already. The relief that he even accepted his.

Catching him in this moment of introspection, Miranda patted his cheek.

“Now, husband. Where did we leave off?” She finished what remained in her glass before starting over from the beginning.

There once was a boy who, however the weather was, went outside to whisper his wish to the moon every night. Every night, the moon heard this boy’s wish to love, and it was brighter than any celestial body the moon shared the heavens with. It lamented that he was so far from any shore as it knew of another like him but was like no other. A singular being, borne by boundless water, whose crown of fire could not be extinguished. So the seas, the reefs, and the moon conspired to guide this creature towards land but could only get him to the coast and no further. Hanging as low it could without kissing the earth, the moon shone brightly over the beach on which he lay. The flecks of mica in the sand numbered the stars and sparkled the same, drawing the attention of a kindly fisherman the moon was certain would care for this boy. He raised him as he had raised his own even though some unknown day, the moon would tell the boy to go forthwith. Many years passed before then, and the fisherman became very old, too old to fish. A fisherman who couldn’t fish was just a man, and eventually he did what all men did. With no one or thing to leave behind, the boy began his journey. As he crossed the country, he grew in height and might as well as in knowledge and hair. His voice became like the road beneath him, and his accent like the —

“Thomas.”

He turned to James as he turned his back to him. It expanded and contracted with a silent sigh.

“It’s only whimsy. Even you must indulge in it on occasion.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t wonder how you two can perceive me as a character in some fairy story. She thinks I can protect you from the world while you believe I can change it.”

“We love you.”

“I know, but regarding me as that extraordinary verges on the whimsical. Not a mindset we can have right now.”

Thomas sprang out of position and clambered over James to face him. Disheveled and red-cheeked, he might have appeared a bit mad to anyone else.

“But you _are_ extraordinary. So much more is possible, because of you. My world that much larger and richer — changed, yes — because you have changed me, and I see it anew. You think an ordinary man could do that? Could have me on my knees in complete thrall to him as you can?”

Thomas didn’t look at James so much as beheld him, and every second he could was blessed. Goodness no longer floated in the nebula of moral philosophy but was rooted in him, earth, rain, and sunlight. The cynosure of his senses, his touch was a laying on of hands and his words incantations. A glancing thought about him, and his very blood sang. Couldn’t James hear it? How Thomas wished they could all hear it!

“Please don’t ever hide your light. Modesty is prized over boldness so that the underprivileged won’t think to try to rise above their station.”

“I see you for your faults —“

“Which you have frequently made clear —“

“ _And_ your inimitable strengths. So I need you to see all of me too, not just what you see as the best of me. What counts is how one can fail, and failure is still a possibility. You yourself have acknowledged that. While Admiral Hennessey seeks my counsel, relies on it, he has not been without his misgivings, and if I don’t have his full confidence, the best of me may not be enough to see this through.”

Thomas crossed his arms and huffed a sound of admission. “Yes, you are right to be concerned, but you mustn’t doubt the courage of your convictions either. That is what my father would have us do. And if the Admiral is who you say he is, then he should see you for who you are. Brilliant and honorable and brave and —”

“Thomas —”

“— devoted and… If he chooses to be blind to that, well, then he is a fool, and we can do with less fools. You have as much credibility as he and can appeal to the Lord High Admiral’s Council without his endorsement.”

“ _Thomas_.” James laughed affectionately.

Thomas collected himself then spoke more calmly but just as earnestly. “Know that whatever comes to pass I will be at your side. After all, you did find me, James. You found me.”

“Oh, so that’s how your little tale ends?”

Thomas stretched out on his side and laid his cheek on James’s shoulder. “You are here now.”

“A full moon, was it?”

“A —? Ah. We didn’t consider that. We were also exceptionally drunk.”

“Pliny the Elder thought the full moon drove men mad by making their brains excessively moist.”

“Well. A full moon it must be. Since life is not life without a little lunacy. It should be a crescent too sometimes. For its shape.”

“Waxing or waning?”

“Hm. I’ll need your expertise in deciding.”

James curved his hands into opposing half-circles. Thomas’s finger hovered indecisively before selecting the left.

“Waning.” James captured the finger in his hand. “Do you remember what you said to me before my departure?”

“I do.”

“‘After you’ve left the safety of port. After you’ve lost sight of land. When you struggle to sever yourself from the seas, let this guide you back to me.’”

In the study, surrounded by books read many times over like the one in James’s hands, Thomas had stopped him from seeing the inscription inside. Cognizant of the sailing tradition of entrusting one’s fortune to objects and rituals, he elected it to be their talisman to keep harm at bay for when they were apart. James commented that he normally didn’t arrange for good luck in advance but promised with an officer’s solemnity not to read it until castoff.

“I can see now a home for me. With you.”

“In Nassau?”

“Yes.”

“An honest life for the three of us?”

“A better chance at one than we will ever have here. The current state of affairs is obviously far from ideal, but after the pardons are issued, it will be ripe for a new start, with attitudes permissive enough to allow for one that can also be favorable to us.”

“How permissive? Many are English still. A change in location doesn’t necessarily cure one of that.”

“The true centers of governance are a tavern and a brothel, and apart from the one church’s negligibly sized flock, its inhabitants make few bones about impropriety. A few officers spoke of some things with distaste. Prostitutes soliciting any man, woman at all hours. Pirates like Swann and Culliford. Loud couplings out in the open.”

“In the open? Really? Did you see — men with men? Women with women?”

“Thomas, I was rather occupied with the business of the pirates.”

“Of course, of course, I wouldn’t expect anything else from you. But…when we’re there, perhaps we can make love outside. In broad daylight.”

“What, in a piss-stinking alley next to a whorehouse?”

“No. God, no. Although… _No_. On a beach,” he mused as he searched for the bottle they misplaced during earlier activity.

“A secluded beach, I hope.”

“Why, I can see us there already. In the shade of a palm tree. I can see…your strong back spread before me, glistening with clean sweat and moving beneath my hands. _Oh_. I require more hands, lieutenant. To touch you — all of you with. All at once, all the time. Do you think six more would suffice?”

“Eight more. For contingencies.”

“Eight more then, on your recommendation. Ten hands to caress and hold you and…can you hear that? My skin and your skin? Ohhh, the noises that we’re making, James. Yes, like that one. How lovely, so lovely. Again, James. _Oh, James_. Just you and I and the sea spray. The waves crashing on the shore. After I finish inside you, and you in my hand, we can bathe each other in the warm waters. How that would feel, our limbs intertwined underwater. Slippery, yes, like…eels. I’ve never touched an eel.”

“Yes, Christ, fuck, like touching an eel.” 

“Then we can lie on the sand until dry and our skin abraded soft. Mmm, so soft. My lips on your soft skin. Every inch of your skin. My lips, my tongue, everywhere.”

“I should like that very mu— _uch_.”

“How salty you’d taste.” Thomas gathered the drop that clung to James’s cockhead onto his fingertip and licked it off with a grin. “Saltier than you already are.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” James grunted. He heaved himself over to sit astride Thomas. “I would advise my lord to take more care with that mouth of his. See the trouble that it wreaks?”

Without warning, he whipped Thomas’s shirt off over his head. The sound of linen ripping recalled ripped garments past and the thrill of being overpowered by him. Thomas instinctually fell limp, pliable, in anticipation of arms pinned back or the air gently squeezed from him, hair pulled a bit too roughly or his nape gripped a bit too tightly. James, wetting his lips, leaned in with no amount of urgency and held Thomas’s wrists down at his sides.

“Oh god, James…” Thomas exhaled. “James?”

There was the gleam of mischief in his eye, and Thomas saw his doom reflected back in it. James lowered his head as if to kiss the hollow behind Thomas’s ear, and Thomas, turning his to grant him access, scolded himself for misreading James, but then lips didn’t meet his skin — only hair, prickling, tickling hair that was suddenly, impossibly everywhere. Brushing down his neck and along his clavicle, traversing his chest, nipple to nipple, nipped at by teeth from somewhere amidst the whiskers, then tracing the line of his torso to his navel and circling it unrelentingly like a whirlpool. Thomas squirmed, writhed, _flailed_. He choked on his giggles as the bristly onslaught advanced further below.

“Oh — no-oh! No!”

James sat up, bouncing them both with his laughter. 

“Never thought I’d hear Thomas Hamilton say ‘no’ to anything in bed.”

Thomas feigned offense but did consider yanking out a hair of a different sort from James. Fortunately for him, their cheer snuffed out any desire to retaliate.

“I would never have you shave.” 

“Then I shall never shave.”

“You can grow that down to your knees for all I care.”

“Then I shall grow it to my knees.”

“You could part it like curtains when you’re aroused.”

Agonized silence.

“Oh, come here.” Thomas pulled him down by the elbows, but James abruptly lifted his head to abort their kiss.

“Don’t you dare think that I am done with you,” he said in a low growl.

“ _No_. Never be done with me.” Always daring, Thomas smiled impishly and snatched the withheld kiss from him.

James raised the bottle and tipped out a thin stream of oil — _cold_ oil. Thomas yelped with a start and a shiver, earning himself gleefully unapologetic snickering. James drew the entire length of him through the ring of his fingers, coating every inch as thoroughly and methodically as he approached most undertakings. He cupped his left hand around Thomas’s balls, and his thumb slid over each in appreciation of their perfect shapes. He tugged gently, and like he’d pulled on the end of a string, Thomas’s cock twitched in his hold.

Abstinence meant neither lasted for long, and Thomas was soon bending towards the point of release. In need of James’s pleasure as much as his own, he reached down to reclaim James’s cock — his again, and he was James’s again. So attuned to each other, the pace of their strokes adjusted to match, their chests heaved harder and higher in rhythm together. James pitched forward on a high, desperate gasp. With his mouth smeared against Thomas’s, breathing him in and in, he burst over his fingers, then Thomas shortly over his. They smothered their cries in each other’s neck, and their hearts knocked at each other’s breast. Afterwards, when they found their voices, they laughed joyously.

James rolled onto his back with a satisfied groan and drifted into unconsciousness, having slept little and not well on his return journey. Barring a fire or siege, Thomas resolved to have him rest and catered to however vociferously he would protest. The Admiralty and Parliament, his father, the whole damned lot of them could wait another day. Smiling to himself, he planned surprises with sweets in bed, hot baths and perfumes, indulgent suppers with overflowing wine, games with Miranda, her music, the newest books and old favorites and sex, stupid amounts of sex, and conversations and in between them silences, intimate and warm, and — _everything_. He would give James everything.

He swept aside a lock of hair from James’s face. He could see his pupils flitting beneath his eyelids. Dreaming — of Nassau maybe, or some other faraway place where this, so tender and sacred, wasn’t cause for shame. Thomas touched his lips to his temple’s soothing pulse and shut his eyes in prayer. He asked God to show James only mercy and kindness, to fortify him against those who would persecute or oppress him, and to bestow him with unwavering, unerring love.

He quietly slipped out of bed and out of the room and headed down to the kitchen. The room was redolent with the queasily rich combination of spices, fruit, and the metallic tang of blood. He grabbed a bowl from a sideboard and piled grapes and candied kumquats in it. He began to systematically open the cupboards when he heard the clatter of a cup hitting the floor.

“Lord Thomas! You’re —“ Adeliza grabbed a pie pan to shield her eyes with. 

Dressed in underdrawers and the torn shirt that had slipped down his shoulder, Thomas was as good as naked. He promptly opened a door on a tall cabinet and stood behind it for cover.

“You can put that down now.” 

She hesitantly peeked. 

“Why are you up at this hour?”

“Getting honey for Miss Bettina and that cough of hers. She sounds like a moose dying from scrofula.” She grabbed a jar from one of the cupboards. “Can I help you find something?”

“A carafe. Or any similar vessel.”

“We don’t keep those in here.”

She disappeared into another room and returned with a full carafe, two glasses, and a silver tray beneath her arm. She neatly arranged everything on it then added some bread and cheese. 

“Don’t my lord look funny. You’re a head and a pair of feet. Bare feet, I might add. Walking around here like that, soon you’ll be coughing too. Right. So all this for you and the lady?”

“Oh.” Thomas smiled sheepishly. A flush cascaded from his scalp to his chest. The flush of young love. “For the lieutenant.”

“Suppose you’ll manage this yourself then. Anything else I can help with?”

“No. Thank you. Please get some sleep.”

“And you, my lord. Good night.”

“Good night.”

 

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

When Thomas was a boy, he observed through the gap between doors his putative future as a man of the world. Until he was wrenched away by the ear, he wondered as he watched if one day he too would be grousing about the price of pineapples and Catholic conspiracies over fingerfuls of cake. Grow spectacularly in girth and marry women who couldn’t give head like their mistresses, play at war in fancy dress and count victories in royal marriages. The more incestuous the better apparently to Thomas’s confusion, but a lack of comprehension didn’t blunt the dread that filled him. This alone was sufficient motivation for him to sneak out through the cellar door one night.

“Lord Hamiltooon!” 

His name echoed all around him as if God in his omnipresence was calling out to him. Stopped at the wicket gate, he looked over his shoulder at the manor. Ever patient Blackwell and an open door’s yellow plane of light bade him home. He turned towards the deepening darkness ahead of him. From within it too, God called out to him. In the night between trees, he wouldn’t have to hide himself. 

As a man of the world, Thomas was expected to mediate between who he was and who he had to be, to choose between freedom and safety. Why he had to choose one over the other was a question that had been answered with countless livelihoods, spirits, and bodies. Even for him, he who had nearly everything, some freedom was not truly freedom, and some safety was not the exclusion of danger. In salons, he had conjectured that the impossibility of having both fully was a precept put into their minds by those men he espied as a boy, men who required fear to reinforce their power, men he was raised to emulate. He proposed that perhaps this could be, albeit not without great challenges and sacrifices to their privilege, proven wrong, and the accusations of madness flew once more. 

On his darker days, he regretted having made it so easy for them to regard him as less than a whole man, to whom they could easily do less than human things. If he had kept his head down, kept quiet, held his tongue and loosened it solely to tell amusing anecdotes at parties. If he had managed the family’s interests as dutifully as his father wanted him to do — like a good heir, it would not have been a bad life. It never had been. With practice, he could have tamped down his own sense of difference, which had awakened him to difference all around him, and the fascinating but infuriating complexity of people. He could have settled for comfortable trysts with married men of his own class and stopped believing that there was room in the hearts of others for this monstrous love of his. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to not be himself — to be selfless — as so many did in order to be safe.

Thomas might have had God but only himself to forgive these moments of weakness. Here, at least, the appearance of having choices required no effort to dispel, but this was hardly consolation to him while he was confined to his cabin. His housemate was replaced by a guard, Turner, who monitored him with silent but open disdain for this assignment. Requests for paper and ink were ignored, and pencils confiscated. Banned from the mess, Thomas took his meals alone. When he was fit to work again, he was tasked with pruning the young peach trees, a solitary job that had him identifying bitterly with the cuttings. 

Finding this punishment beyond tedious, Thomas approached Turner on the porch and demanded that he have a cup of tea with him. Met with a quizzical expression, he proceeded to half-heartedly swear off any behavior typical of pernicious agitators like him if he joined him at the table. The assumption that even Turner would want for a little conversation over tea proved to be a sound one. 

“Mr. DeVries is posted at the house today. I should like to go see him.”

“Fine,” Turner muttered as he pored over _The Compleat Planter & Cyderist_, which Thomas had on permanent loan from Oglethorpe’s library.

“Any effort to mitigate the dire state of my hair will be appreciated.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

Thomas swatted away the strands that were caught in his eyelashes. “Obviously you’re aware that if you do not accompany me, we will both be disciplined, and while I am prepared to face the consequences, I would prefer to spare you the outcome of the unthinkably brazen act of insubordination I intend to commit.”

“Getting your hair cut?” 

“Getting my hair cut.”

Turner rubbed the back of his bald head. “You should know I had a chat with Piggles yesterday.”

“Oh? What about?”

“If you could be trusted to mind your place without constant supervision. Can’t say he was well convinced, but I assured him you’re no longer cause for concern.” He leaned into the book to study an illustration of a fruiting branch. “I’ve not mentioned the nicked books if that’s why you’re looking like you just smelled a cat fart.”

While Thomas would have welcomed a cat, he was actually bristling at the notion that he was “no longer cause for concern.” He itched more than his back did to explicate that although his civility could be mistaken for capitulation, he was in fact using it to attain Turner’s. Then realizing the extent to which he had succeeded, he chortled at the impressive durability of his pride and set off for the great house alone.

He found DeVries stationed off the back veranda. Whorls of hair eddied around his feet. With an unnervingly carefree wave of his razor, he gestured to the chair.

Thomas ran his hand over his smooth jaw and then his head in a cursory inventory of its scars. He delighted in feeling the air on the backs of his ears again. It was the kind of trifling thing that could transform one’s outlook on life, but the effect on his was fleeting. Oglethorpe was awaiting his turn in the chair. Wigless, he was almost unrecognizable, any chap come in from the road for a cut and a shave, but the bemused smile that curdled Thomas’s mood was most familiar.

“Mr. Milton.”

“Mr. Oglethorpe.”

“I’ve some time. Why don’t you and I have a drink? Catch up.”

Thomas smirked, amused to find himself on the other side of this play.

“Yes, why don’t we?”

The glass of peach brandy set before Thomas would go untouched. When Oglethorpe raised his to his lips, Thomas attributed his reluctance to drink to the early hour, a demonstration of his newfound appreciation for propriety. In truth, he simply couldn’t remember if he’d pissed in that specific decanter before.

He sat back and let Oglethorpe prate on about increased trade with the northern colonies, the prisoners who agreed to stay on as employees, the praise the trustees heaped on _their_ work, he never forgot to emphasize. Thomas intermittently nodded and hummed his approval as his eyes trawled the room. It had been several weeks since he was there last. The harsh rays of the sun hadn’t much faded the memory like it did the carpets and the upholstery. Little was different otherwise. A bouquet of white azaleas sat on the card table. Maybe the shutters had been repainted. He followed a dusty shaft of light from the floor up to the painting of the trustees. The multitude of their blank, black eyes found his, and like he’d been plunged into a bath of ice water, he realized with shocking clarity who Lord Whosit resembled.

The man in his wedding portrait. 

“Oh my bloody god.”

“ _Language_. Please.”

“Oh my bloody —“

He doubled over, convulsing with hysterical laughter.

“Oh, Mira— Miran— if o— if o— if only you — you could have — could have — seen him!”

With his mouth open in a soundless cry, he stamped the floor with his foot.

“Jesus — are you having a fit? _Are-you-ha-ving-a-fit?_ Is he having a fit? Good — good lord, get him out of here.”

Smythe hauled Thomas up to his feet by the arm. His amusement withered instantly on contact. He shook off Smythe’s grip and left without further exchange of words. 

Out in the corridor, he dashed right towards the music room, remembering the books and documents he had stashed there, a motley lot that included charters and an introduction to husbandry. He wondered if Petrarch would be too mawkish for Turner, but he’d scarcely turned the door knob when the frenzied clacking of shoes interrupted the contemplation of his guard’s literary tastes.

“Lord Hamilton!”

It was an echo reaching him years later. His hand dropped back to his side. She was so small when he saw her last — five was she then? Six? Her features still held onto the same soft shapes from childhood. Thomas smiled, his memory a boundless source of surprise for him.

“No, not… Please. My god. Abigail. Little Abigail.”

“It is you! It is —” Her eyes searched his face. “I was told…my lord, I was told that you had…passed.”

“ _Oh_. Is that so? Well, you might be a better judge than I of whether that is true or not.” 

The attending housekeeper and the woman whose custody she had broken from caught sight of them from the far end of the entrance hall.

“Let us talk elsewhere.”

He ushered her down the stairs and through the kitchen to a side garden, where they sat between drying lines of tablecloths, hidden from view.

“While I am beyond elated to see a friendly face, I must first know — what on earth are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re to be kept in this place.”

“No. I’m staying with acquaintances of my father, the Ashfords, in Savannah. I heard Mr. Ashford mention your name, the son of an Earl, and-and — I had to know. I gave him no reason, but I insisted I be brought here. If by any chance, I could see that it was indeed you.”

“But, my dear, why are you in Georgia at all?”

“Have you not heard?”

“I’m afraid the owner of this establishment is quite leery of any news from outside reaching our ears. And what we do hear cannot be relied on to be truthful.”

Abigail pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and twisted it around her hand. Her words came in trickles at first then torrents. Her violent abduction, her capture by another, her imprisonment, her uncertain liberation. Her hands flapped like birds descending on seeds. Her mouth elastic as she struggled to parse the terror that wracked those weeks, the immensity of which exceeded her capacity for description. Thomas could hear in her telling the desperate need to speak truth to these events since the cynicism of others, which came far more readily than the work of belief, was a given for her sex. He listened patiently as she unburdened herself. Her hands eventually calmed then joined in her lap before she launched into the second act.

“Miranda?”

_Peter, that lying, burning sack of dead, fetid rats._

This flare of anger subsided when he thought of her elbow-to-elbow with Captain Flint, a man he supposed would only embrace a companion of substantial mettle. This suited her somehow, and his imagination crackled like fireworks. He pictured the allegorical figure of Fortitude, armored and imperious, except the wreckage she looked out upon wasn’t wrought by Samson but a pirate. 

Excitedly he pressed Abigail to speak more of her, but she grew quiet and reached out to take his hand. Long accustomed to the touch of force, her gentleness startled him. He willed his hand back open and allowed hers into it. For her to disregard etiquette so flagrantly, he understood this wasn’t a gesture made lightly and folded his fingers over hers. Even after such a lengthy rehearsal, the hurt was no less gutting. If he could have known, what he would have done to Peter… It was a question he didn’t have strength to finish, never mind answer.

“She said that you knew each other in London.”

“If we ever kept the company of Mr. Flint, it was not to my knowledge.”

“Oh, but Flint is a nom de guerre. He introduced himself to me as McGraw, a friend of my father’s.”

Thomas let out a strangled laugh. “No.”

“No?” She furrowed her brow. “But I am sure of it. I know it.”

He fell still as his mind bargained with itself, then rationalized. If Peter lied about Miranda, why wouldn’t he have about James? Of all the incredible things Abigail told him, why shouldn’t he believe that? That Flint was James? That James was Flint? Why deny himself the possibility? Why wasn’t he on his knees, begging Abigail and God to grant James life again in whatever incarnation?

“His name?”

_My name is James. James McGraw._

“Captain Flint. Mr. McGraw. He was sentenced to be hanged. I was sent away before then, but he and the other pirate escaped —”

A broken but grateful sob erupted from Thomas. He covered his mouth, embarrassed by the ugly, utterly naked sound.

“He lives?” he asked from behind his fingers. Charles Town was less than a day’s travel away. They had all been so close.

“To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

“And…how is your father?”

“My father? My father — he… The pirates fired upon the town. Leveled it while — while he was in the square.”

Abigail’s gaze shifted to the handkerchief strangling her fingers. If she grieved at all in the expected ways, out of a child’s obligation to worship the father or out of love, she did with remarkable restraint. Most likely she had little choice but to grow quickly out of many such ways. Thomas’s instinct was to offer sympathy, even though her dry eyes didn’t invite it, but it was tempered by the vicious impulse to gloat in James raining hellfire on all that Peter traded their lives for. Something he could never imagine doing — _done_. That wounded animal inside of him kicked and hurled itself at the wall of his chest again. He felt it as he gathered the front of his shirt in a fist, the bruising beat of his heart.

Abigail rose from the bench. Her chaperone with Oglethorpe on her heels pushed aside a tablecloth.

“Mr. Oglethorpe, Lord Hamilton is to leave with me.”

“Oh!” Ashford put an arm around her. “Please, do excuse her.”

“You will release him?”

“Ah, miss —“

“ _Peter_ — if Peter is…”

Thomas’s throat tightened around a sickening realization. He looked askance at Oglethorpe, wig reinstalled, and felt himself veering — from vindication to sorrow, excitement to horror, joy to trepidation. Each pulling a part of him in a different direction, he thought he might be pulled apart.

“Unfortunately Mr. Hamilton appears to be in some distress,” he said in a low voice to Abigail. “A chronic problem since his time in bedlam. Any more disturbances like this may cause irrevocable harm so it would best to leave him be for the foreseeable future. You two are more than welcome to wait in the parlor for Mr. Farrowgate to return with Sir Ashford.”

“Yes, I think we shall. Abigail, we can discuss this at home.”

“But, Mrs. Ashford. I — Lord Hamilton, I —!” Abigail stammered as she was steered back into the house. “I will come back! As soon as I can! Mrs. Ashford!”

The echo of her voice returned from whence it came and was replaced by the disappointed tapping of a foot. Thomas turned his attention to the shadow cast on the white span of a tablecloth. It furled high on an upward gust, revealing Turner who’d come to collect him.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

Thomas held his breath as he watched a book tip over the edge of a shelf. It struck the floor with a frightful thud. Another book followed suit, and then another. Before long, books were diving off the shelves in waves of leather and yellowed paper. _What a ghastly mess_ , he thought as paintings swung on their nails, and chairs fell onto their backs. Ink dripped down the side of his desk and onto the brand new Mughal carpet. If he ran, maybe he could save something. Miranda’s childhood drawing of a pet turtle. His grandmother’s ewer. The roosters. But he couldn’t run. There were three of them. Two to hold him by the arms, and one to block the doorway.

The dream always ended there, at the point his memory failed him. He found himself on the floor every time.

If his mind did consider home the place he returned to in his dreams, for most of Thomas’s life it had been the estate in Ashbourne. With its rolling hills and horsewhips and butterflies, it was not unlike a dream. Then on the 19th of July, as he noted in his diary then repeatedly underlined, the house in London finally supplanted it, a month after James’s entry into their lives. Although marred by certain events, Thomas dreaded the night he would not awake in his dreams to the house that James had made a home but to this godforsaken cabin.

Doubly confined again, Thomas slept the time away to spare himself the sight of those walls. Days passed as impressions before the inner call to rise started to pester him. Warmed by morning, he lifted his heavy head and sipped the air. It had a texture that scraped his sinuses and throat. His eyes, filmed with rheum, focused dimly on his hands. He wriggled what he could and counted, a finger for each year, in an attempt to rouse his brain into working order.

“Oh!” Abigail threw down her embroidery hoop to fetch him a cup of water.

Sitting up, Thomas became swiftly reacquainted with his body through each of its parts’ own particular ache. He drank, but the water came back up in the same state it went down.

“Oh god,” he coughed. He pinched his wet shirt away from his chest, now fully aware of his wretchedness. “You shouldn’t have to see this.”

“I’ve seen my share of horrors. I would not include you among them.” She handed him a towel. “May I ask if you are improved?”

“Improved?”

He looked around the room. Turner stood in a corner, thumbing through another book from Thomas’s illicit collection. Behn, he recognized from its small size, which pleased him. He rubbed his eyes to better see Abigail, her excruciatingly youthful face the inverse of his, and summoned a smile.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

She laughed her relief then sat down at the foot of the bed.

“And you? How are you faring? Do the Ashfords treat you well?”

“Yes, most kindly, seeing as they’ve brought me back to visit you. They have no children of their own and would spoil me if I allowed them.”

“I say you should let them spoil you silly. You deserve it.”

“I’m glad that you’re in much better humor too. For selfish reasons admittedly. I know no one here. No one who’d…”

“Ah. Of course. Another day — soon, I promise, because we will have many days.”

She nodded firmly. “When you are able. I cannot comprehend what you’ve had to endure here.”

“What I’ve had to endure? Oh. Yes.”

She leaned in with a narrowed eye to Turner and whispered, “In due time, I will free you from this place.”

“Free me?” he croaked. Chuckling, he envisioned her absconding with him over her shoulder in the dead of night. 

“Mr. Oglethorpe seems to believe that by keeping you imprisoned he is acting virtuously, but I suspect he may be persuaded more by capital than virtue to release you.”

“For many, they are two sides of the same coin.”

“I know that all too well now. The Ashfords have been working on my behalf to expedite the transferral of the estate to me. I swear to you that no price will be too high for me to leave you here.”

“Abigail, I…” Thomas shook his head in disbelief. “I am moved, truly, but why do this for me? After all this time, I might as well be a stranger to you.”

“When I was…taken, it seemed everyone’s designs for me were to ensure a ransom, but Lady Hamilton — she ensured my safety. When I was so alone in my despair, she set aside her troubles to comfort me as if she had none at all. I shall never forget that. Nor have I forgotten the generosity of your spirit when I was a child and the joy you two brought my family. Knowing what my father did. To you and her. How much he took from both of you and Mr. McGraw. And for what? He cannot atone for his crimes, and there is no just compensation, but freeing you from this place will be as much for her as it is for you.”

Abigail held Thomas’s gaze, stalwart, and he believed. 

For all of his words, none would serve him now. Overcome by an odd calm, he could only think to uncurl Abigail’s fists. Her hands were pale and as fine-boned as he remembered Miranda’s, fanned across the keys of her harpsichord. He rested his head on them and closed his eyes. 

He thanked her. He thanked Miranda.

 

<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>

 

The new groundskeeper joined Thomas and Ellsworth on the northeastern field and directed them without preface to put out their hands. He pulled his fist out of his pocket and opened it over Thomas’s upturned palm. Seeds. Dark mahogany-colored ones and ones still furred with cotton. Thomas pushed them around with his little finger and marveled at their size and promise.

He asked the groundskeeper for his name as he did with every newcomer. Looking out at the endless furrows, he ignored Thomas’s extended hand and soundly spat on the ground. The name he presented, Thomas later learned, had been given to him by the first Englishman he encountered when he was a child.

“‘Jim’? Not ‘James’?”

“His name was ‘James.’ Too many Jameses.”

“Thomases as well.” Thomas tilted his head in thought. “But this man could have called you by any other name than his own if he would not call you by yours.”

Jim shrugged indifferently. “It was the only name he could think of.”

Thomas guffawed at the sheer idiocy of it. His entreaties for Jim’s real name though were tersely rebuffed. A favor, he joked as he cleaned out his thumbnail with a small knife. To spare the colonists his godless savagery at their amusement over mispronouncing it. Duly chastened, Thomas stopped asking.

While he and Ellsworth chatted about the inclement weather, a pair of guards unlocked and opened the front gates. A carriage waited on the other side of them. Its passenger disembarked and passed through unshackled and unbothered. If he wasn’t a prisoner, he wasn’t a merchant or some buttoned-up bureaucrat either, judging by the state of his clothes and the sheathed dagger that crossed his hip. A guard led him up the road, and in their wake, the bordering fields began to buzz with guesses as to his identity. A long-lost uncle coming to claim what’s his, Thomas heard one prisoner speculate. A terrifying new martinet to keep them in line. Possible. A hog butcher, Jim contributed with a wry smirk.

That night Halberstam breathlessly reported to his bunkmates that he overheard Waltham tell Tunstaple that Other Grace told him that she overheard Clay tell Farrowgate that he overheard Oglethorpe’s curious visitor speak the name John Silver, and word spread posthaste. _The pirate king_. This gossip sent ripples of excitement across the plantation. No one could comprehend why a bore like Oglethorpe would have any business with him, that wild-haired, one-legged demon.

Through to supper the next day, tongues wagged with sustained avidity. The guards champed at the bit to relay what was whispered in the corridors of the house. They along with the prisoners ate up the gory stories of the pirates, including the destruction of Charles Town as it was recounted by a recent arrival who claimed dubiously to have been there. They were just as eager to declare what they would do if they came across the likes of Black Sam or Calico Jack. Few professed interest in joining their crews while the rest would apprehend them for King and Country and earn the admiration of their compatriots. Their bluster inspired an impromptu pantomime of a sword fight with discarded wheel spokes and mock-Flint’s dramatic defeat. As he twisted and twitched in an unseen noose, Thomas rushed out of the mess.

The dull roar of their jeers and laughter followed him to the stables where he gripped the paddock fence to steady himself. His mind raced to formulate an argument of impervious logic in defense of James, an impassioned appeal to their better natures, a treatise against capital punishment as it related to Christian humanism, _something_ , _anything_ , other than what resounded loudly in his head, which was that he loved him. He loved him. He loved him.

A horse brusquely nudged his shoulder and gave him a short sniff. Taking the hint, Thomas released himself from his fretting and reached for the apple in his pocket.

By the time he reached his cabin, the drizzle petered off. A brief respite from the relentless rain but not the pall of damp that left them equally wet. After the air’s moist breath blew out every spark, Thomas packed away the flint and steel in defeat. Sat in the dark, he fanned himself and listened to the frogs in the swollen drainage ditches demand _now-now_ , _now-now_ to no avail. With fever spreading throughout the plantation, the poplar tree might gain a few more lines.

He grazed its scarred trunk with his fingers as he and Jim passed it on their way to the pines where Thomas had seen the shrubs Jim described to him. Upon reaching them, Jim broke off a cluster of pink buds and handed it to Thomas, pointed to a rock and ordered him in the manner of a tired parent to sit. Thomas twirled it sullenly between his fingers, wishing he could be so distracted. Desperate to return to his bed but too daunted by the walk back, the ill pairing of restlessness and indecision had honed the pangs of want in his shivering bones. The want of being cared for and comforted, of being well and not worrying. What he would have given, because there was always something left to be taken, to rest in the home of their embraces again.

He waved away these useless thoughts like so many gnats. None more persistent than the temptation to stop, to just stop and lie there, and let the forest floor grow over him. He pushed himself up to assist Jim in stripping bark off the branches. It would feel good to help. As he threaded the twig through a buttonhole, a fat raindrop landed on his head and slid down into his collar. He looked up. Through an opening in the canopy, he could see a gathering storm churning and tumbling the clouds. An angry sky, it was a beautiful sky, painted in the hues of crushed bellflowers.

The impending storm seemed to vibrate beneath his skin, goosepimpling his arms. A slow, ponderous gloom unrolled across the earth and leached it of color. Lightning strobed inside the cloud mass and broke out in bolts to splinter the firmament. In the distance, thunder rumbled like cannon fire. 

Thomas pressed his hand to the window by his bed when the world stopped suddenly but the wind-whipped trees. That breath-stealing moment before the jagged, hissing rain fell. It battered and sheeted down the window. Spat through the gaps in the frame and ran between his fingers. Thunder cracked the air open like it was stone, and the cabin rattled like it would come down around his ears. He wondered if those Puritans prayed that this would be the divine correction to cleanse the world of sinners like him. It was no more ridiculous a fancy than his — that this was the sea, bound to the sky, whose currents would carry him to James. Wherever he was. By the storm’s end, Thomas knew that he would still be here, imprisoned but alive and unrepentant, as his love, the sustenance on which he survived, would still be too.

Done with the tyranny of the weather and the stale taste of sickness, he dragged himself out of the cabin. The wind slammed the door shut behind him and propelled him down the porch steps. Water poured off the overhang in curtains and effaced the paths. It ran into his mouth and ears, and stung his eyes. He had to laugh. He drank the rain.

He was not mad. He would not be driven mad, and if he had ever been, let it be because of love and not this. In varying temperatures, durations, and forms, he had known love well. How full his stores were, having sought it from whoever intimated it, chased it in every secret kiss in every hidden corner, because everyone held the promise of it. Many times he mistook lust for love and made a fool, but in the heat of it, it was still love to him, and there were those times men denied it and him as he bore his as a gift to them. _Take it. This. My heart_ , he said and learned what a fearsome thing a heart could be. So he longed for a love he hadn’t known — the love of a brave man. Since it never was predictable or punctual, and rarely traveled straight or appeared undisguised, finding it when he least expected it in the most unexpected person was his life’s sweetest surprise, and he would find it again.

He shed his clothes on the porch and bundled himself in a blanket. He puttered about, placing jars beneath leaks, then sorted through the books he stowed atop a beam. He selected one with some satisfaction for Turner to read next. When a dripping Farrowgate appeared instead to deliver his dram of medicine, Thomas set it aside in a drawer.

Farrowgate cleared his throat and straightened his back. He announced to this audience of one that Oglethorpe had granted Thomas the option of joining his fellow fallen noblemen in their annex of the plantation. He dryly listed all the benefits that would accompany this change in status. Less strenuous work assignments for a start, a variety of creature comforts that he surely missed. Thomas interrupted his recitation to scoff loudly and vigorously. With frustration belying the feeling of slightness, he crossed briskly into Farrowgate’s space and demanded to know what Oglethorpe’s agenda was. Farrowgate retreated from him, staggered backwards into a wall. His eyes jumped nervously from Thomas’s face to his exposed collarbone to the corded thigh that sliced through the folds of the blanket then back up again. Dressed head to toe in oilcloth, there was barely more visible of him than his eyes. He stuttered, that pirate — _rumors_ — and claimed ignorance. Having naught to say to this, Thomas dropped onto a bench and threw back the foul elixir into his mouth.

Farrowgate pushed up the wide brim of his hat to wipe the rain-mingled sweat from his brow. He swallowed audibly. The already thick air seemed to thicken further with all that he wanted to say but couldn’t say, whatever that might have been. Thomas only knew what he wished Farrowgate would say and felt those knotted words in his own throat, choking him. 

_Speak_ , he pled silently. _Speak_. But a beat too many passed, and the moment was gone. 

On his way out, Farrowgate hesitated at the door and reached into his cloak. He laid a rain-streaked book on the desk. The third volume of _Plutarch’s Lives_ , the one in which Alexander slew countless men with his bladed grief. After he parted, Thomas turned it over in his hands and dried the cover with the blanket. Whether this was an apology or an act of charity, if this was all he could give without giving anything of himself, it reminded Thomas that Farrowgate deserved grace too.

When the bell rang in the morning, Thomas rolled over on the seventh toll and opened the bedside window. 

_Birds_. He could hear birds, bluethroats and flycatchers heralding the end of the rain.

Regardless of Oglethorpe’s hollow gesture of leniency, Thomas was a still very much a prisoner and readied himself for work. He stepped off the porch onto what was not so solid ground, mud sucking him in nearly up to his shin. He looked down at his submerged foot and sighed heavily. Any man would have shook his fist at the sky and denounced God and that useless son of his, and maybe the holy mother for good measure. Swearing under his breath, Thomas plunged his other foot into the mire and plodded towards the sugarcane field.

Upon his arrival, the prisoners paused their work to give him a wide berth. With all of the guards’ eyes on him, he collected a hoe and walked to the far end of the field. He could hear the rats skittering among the cane as no man made a sound until he did, planting the implement at his feet. Steel struck the earth like so many times before, dragged through the loam and combed over stones and old roots, turning up history to present eyes that could at long last see a future. In no time, his palms would blister and tear, and the sun would sear his skin red. He whistled through the misery of it all as others did but always so hopelessly out of tune.

Where labor had made him stronger, life had taken its toll everywhere else. Clutching the locked fingers of his right hand, Thomas kneeled on the ground like a clockwork figure in a need of a wind. He tensed in preparation for a hoarsely-shouted reprimand or the determined approach of one of the more overbearing guards, or worse. He watched them with suspicion as they watched him with uncertainty, and waited, goading them with his eyes. Scattered along the edge of the field, they shifted their weight from foot to foot, their hands wavered between cudgel and hip, but there they all remained, none daring to harass him.

 _Get up_.

“A second,” he said to himself. A day. A decade.

A dirt-caked hand came into his view. Thomas glared at it, determined to spurn any assistance or show of pity. 

He clasped it, and Jim hoisted him to his feet.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg struggle chapter but what can you do except post the fucker. man, writing feelings is, like — i mean, what are those anyway, my brain is 99.9% mise-en-scene.
> 
> *throws feelings in trash*  
> *sets trash on fire*  
> *chokes on toxic fumes from burning trash feelings*


End file.
